Certainly not an InDesign question, I thought the pub would be a good place to ask this, given that while many users of InDesign are creative professionals, there would be users who are on the more mechanical Pre-Press side.
I am a prepress operator for an offset printing business which receives “press-ready” PDFs by the majority of its customers, while some supply PDFs and natives, or art for formatting. Despite our PDF export options for InDesign spelled out step-by-step as well as a joboptions file; and reps having the URL of the said site plus hymn-sheets to send to customers over email, we still receive PDFs which don't always meet our needs.
The majority of my day is not spent using InDesign but rather Acrobat Professional and a plug in called Enfocus Pitstop Pro. This plug-in allows us to perform many changes not normally or easily available in Acrobat, and without it i'd be stuck. Most of the time, the biggest change will be removing crop-marks set too close during PDF export.
I recently had 200+ files which had vector-drawn maps on each file with inconsistencies in the colours between them (e.g. roads on one map would be in RGB, on another would be 20%K, on another would be a faux-grey out of CMYK…) and would have been a nightmare recolouring the files not only one by one, but graphic by graphic. After combining all 200+ files with Acrobat, I was able to use the plug-in to map the various colours to desired colours. Put simply, a task which may have taken a week only took half an hour. But the plug-in required an Action List – a macro which would find colours and replace them with new colours… but such a customised action list needed to be made first.
So my question (FINALLY!!!) is does anyone know of any Enfocus Action lists out there which would be useful to other prepress users? I have googled the term “enfocus action lists” and the search results mainly redirect to the Enfocus company themselves rather than other users. There is one site on the google returned search called https://actionlistexchange.net/ but the site appears to simply mirror the actions which ship with Enfocus Pitstop Pro.
I'm willing to share the ones I have created and wonder how many people use Enfocus Pitstop Pro, how many generate their own action lists, and whether there are any sites with aftermarket Action Lists.
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