PDF Checkpoint for Mac

PDF Checkpoint for Mac checks portable documents for errors, sorts them into folders, converts them to one-page PDFs or images, makes visual tweaks, and saves them in a copy. This premium app supports multiple file operations, analyzes the documents as they're loaded, and looks for predetermined settings or content keywords. Overall, the app feels snappy and very focused, but we did encounter a few interface peculiarities.

PDF Checkpoint for Mac features a main window with five sections in addition to an optional document details drawer. Adding files is done by dropping PDFs into the Files area or by using the "Choose Files..." button. Multilingual PDF documents (LPDF) are not supported. The four available actions are: sorting documents into folders determined by the presence of errors, converting PDFs to one of five image formats, splitting multi-page documents, optimizing PDFs by changing the color scheme, and compressing images. When testing two six-page documents, it took us four seconds to convert them to JPEG images and two seconds to split them into 12 PDFs. Curiously enough, the app's settings are located not in Preferences, but in the "Actions" button on the toolbar.

Although PDF Checkpoint for Mac provides a focused and relatively in-depth feature set, it will only be useful to you, if you handle a lot of PDFs. The preflight scanning features, as well as options like scaling, PPI and scale adjustment, color correction, and compression, provide a level of customizability to an otherwise static format.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of PDF Checkpoint for Mac 1.6.4.

• Fixed an issue in which line weight wasn't detected correctly during preflighting on systems where comma is used as decimal separator.
• Line weight in the Summary table now uses comma as decimal separator if selected in the System Preferences.
• Improved UI behavior when reordering preflight profiles.
• Selected profile in the Profiles window is now remembered when app quits.
• The full screen functionality is removed from the main and Profiles windows.