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Maplehurst

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At present we are building some work flows using Enfocus Full Switch to Pre-flight and proof (via EFI XF) PDFs prior to sending them to press.

Most of our PDFs come from InDesign, but some are generated by the ESKO Backstage/packedge system that we use.

Esko have migrated to using a version of PDF format as their main file format, however these file have a few variations, i.e., linked externals, that mean they are not much use outside of the backstage system. While we are able to export as an Adobe PDF for the purposes of going to press, we would like to try and put a check into the work flow that will prevent any of the rouge ESKO pdfs from going through the system, unfortunately we can't find a way of telling the difference between the two files outside of the backstage system.

Does any one know of a method telling the two files apart that we may be able to implement with Full Switch
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Brook Braswell
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Not being familiar with the ESKO pdf formats I would say that I have seen other facsimile PDF formats.
The most common difference in the format is that a normalized PDF has the beginning of %PDF-
This is usually followed by some version tag like 1.3

There is also a creator tag that should indicate a difference for you...
Parsing the first few lines of a PDF should give you an indication of what you might need.

Example of a normalized PDF

%PDF-1.3
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj
<< 
/Creator (Canon )
/CreationDate (D:20100216110020-05'00')
/Producer ( )
>> 
endobj

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Maplehurst

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Brook1966, thanks for that sounds promising.
However excuse my ignorance how would I go about parsing a pdf, and potentially fitting it into a FullSwitch workflow?
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Brook Braswell
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Brook1966 thanks for that solved our problem perfectly.

For you info FullSwitch is just an automated workflow system from Enfocus that allowes you to daisychain hot folders and applications like PitStop and Adobes creative suite to process files.

It turns out that the ESKO files are all produced as version 1.6 and everything else in the system should be 1.3 (to comply with pdf/x-1a:2001) ready for press.