Straight-forward PDF/A support

Over the years the importance of PDF/A compliance in PDF based long-term archival workflows and in workflows where documents are submitted to regulatory agencies such as governments is steadily growing. pdfaPilot from callas software flawlessly turns interactive forms and invoices, technical documentation, books and any other PDF or Office files you can think of into robust, standards-compliant PDF/A documents; checking files against the standard and fixing them if they don’t comply.

callas pdfaPilot comes as a server version that provides full hot folder automation and a command-line interface, or an SDK version for closer integration. There is also a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat and a standalone desktop application that doesn’t even need Acrobat to be installed – your choice.

Ensure quality

The quality control (also called preflight) engine in callas pdfaPilot is so good that it was licensed by Adobe for use in Adobe Acrobat Pro. On top of that the engine passed industrystandard compliance tests such as the Isartor suite; created specifically to ensure full compliance with the PDF/A standard

This ensures that all files ending up in your archive or being sent out comply completely with the PDF/A standard. And with full support of all parts of the PDF/A standard created by the ISO, callas pdfaPilot has all of your workflows covered.

Be good

The best way to have good PDF/A files is to properly create them to begin with. For this, callas pdfaPilot can automatically convert Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher and Visio files into quality PDF files for you. This can be done in an automated way with callas pdfaPilot Server or you simply drag them on the document window of callas pdfaPilot Desktop and the conversion takes place in the best possible way.

OpenOffice documents are fully supported too and on Mac OS X Pages and Keynote of course work as well. Using the integrated Adobe engine, callas pdfaPilot even does quality conversion of EPS and PostScript files for you, without requiring Acrobat Distiller to be installed.

For additional ease of use, callas pdfaPilot supports full integration in Microsoft SharePoint allowing users in such environments immediate support for proper PDF/A creation as well.

Fix always

In an archival workflow it is important that you can fix whatever is wrong with the PDF files you receive because each and every of those files has to end up in a PDF/A compliant way. That is why callas pdfaPilot comes with a guaranteed way to make PDF files compliant with the PDF/A standard.

If possible the PDF file will be optimized and brought into line with the PDF/A standard by optimizing the internal PDF structure. If that fails however, files can be converted into images while preserving the text. This offers the best of two worlds: those pesky PDF files are converted into PDF/A successfully and they remain fully searchable in your archive.

Compare visually

In archive workflows it’s a common occurrence to work with different versions of the same file. How do you figure out what exactly is different between two files? Also, if you have to change a file (for example to make it PDF/A compliant) how can you be sure this process introduced no visual changes?

callas pdfaPilot has a visual compare feature that makes this incredibly easy by masking out what is the same in both files and highlighting any changes in red. In callas pdfaPilot Server the comparisons can be automated; this provides a quick way to automatically check if different steps in your workflow could have introduced any problems.

Automate to your needs

So what if you have more than just a sporadic PDF file you need to work on? There are many ways to use callas pdfaPilot in an automated way. It is all up to your requirements:

callas pdfaPilot Desktop already offers a neat batch feature that lets you run a quality control profile or a PDF fix-up on a whole folder of files - easy to use and quick as lightning.

And if you want to process higher volumes of files or you want to free up operators by hands-off automation, callas pdfaPilot Server provides just that. The hot folder interface lets you setup different watched folders that automatically pick up files and process them.

The engine inside callas pdfaPilot is fully multi-processor aware so it takes advantage of all of the speed available in your server. Additionally callas pdfaPilot Server has load distribution capabilities to enhance performance by using multiple servers.

A command-line interface and a full developer SDK are available when closer integration or more fine-grained control is of the essence. With their additional availability on many Unix flavors, the CLI and SDK allow painless integration in a wide range of operating environments.