PitStop vs. Quite a Box of Tricks

[Jonathan_Lewis@adobeforums.com]

Hello,

It was suggested over on the Windows side of this forum that I post my question here since more pre-press people hang out on the Mac side and could give me more information.

With my job doing magazine layout, I have to work with numerous advertisers to get their ads ready to print. One of the most common problems I see with these ads is the use of 4-color black text (instead of 100% K). In many cases these companies are sending PDF files of ads they created in less-than-industry-standard programs, and either don't know how to set the text to be 100% K, or the program doesn't support the CMYK color model at all.

I understand that both PitStop and Quite a Box of Tricks will do the job of converting the 4-color black text to 100% K. What I'm wondering is which of the two is the better solution? There's a substantial price difference between the two (PitStop is about 3x the cost of Box of Tricks). My budget is limited, but if PitStop is a better solution I may be willing to pay the extra.

Does anyone here have experience with either or both of these plugins, and which would you recommend?

Thanks!
Jonathan

[Serge_Paulus@adobeforums.com]

If you have to edit acrobat files in the future, choose Pitstop Pro;
if you want to verify/certify files you send to print bureaus, choose Pitstop Pro;
if you think there will be only one use, this black text change, then choose Quite a box.
Anyhow Pitstop is more complex to use and you'll spend a little time understanding Pitstop Pro's strange interface.

[KENSTER8@adobeforums.com]

PitStop is definitely the high-end editor, but we use Quite quite often, too (Box of Tricks, Quite Imposing and Quite Revealing) and they are all pretty useful. Quite seems to convert to CMYK easier, although our Apogee normalizer often will give us a '5-channel' pdf that shows up as only CMYK using Quite OR PitStop. The nice thing about PitStop is that you can set up an action list you can run on a file to do multiple fixes at once on many files. PitStop will also edit type in pdfs that Acrobat might choke on, and will allow you to embed/subset fonts in the pdf, even if they weren't embedded upon creation. And I can't count the times "CVU" needs to be changed to "CV" to make the rip function.

[Jonathan_Lewis@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for your feedback, everyone. I've downloaded the free trial of each plug-in and have been experimenting with them.

I know I'm getting a bit off-topic with this question, but I've been having some trouble getting Quite a Box of Tricks to do what I understood it is supposed to do. When I run the "Change all text to black" function, it's not converting the text to 100% K. I looked in the manual and found a few reasons why this function doesn't work in some circumstances, but I don't think my files meet any of the given criteria for files that won't work. It seems I must be missing something simple, but I can't figure out what it is. Any ideas?

[KENSTER8@adobeforums.com]

When I have that problem, I use Pit Stop's Global Change.
Box only changes it to grayscale, or changes text to black. I guess another reason for having both.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

You must remember that Pitstop can actually search on colour space
models, colour ranges and exact colour values ...

KENSTER8 has a good suggestion by using the PITSTOP GLOBAL CHANGE and
then selecting GRAB on the left and entering a value on the right -
remembering to select SELECTION / PAGE / PAGES or DOCUMENT- at the
bottom ...

Jon