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[mattbeals]

In case anyone doesn't know, I work with Callas, Enfocus and Markzware selling and training for their products.

FlightCheck is perfect for preflighting native files from all the Creative Suite and Quark amongst other native applications (including Office) and PDF's. The built in preflight in InDesign is fine, but it only preflights InDesign documents. For preflighting PDF's FlightCheck will do a very good job of reporting but it will not correct files.

Enfocus PitStop Pro is a PDF editing and preflighting plug-in for Acrobat that is very capable and is the only interactive PDF editor where you can actually manipulate individual objects. Create new rectangles, move a line of type, create elipses, etc. There is also PitStop Extreme that is a stand alone editor.

Callas has their pdfToolbox which is a plug-in and a stand alone PDF editor/preflighting tool. Callas is the OEM of the Acrobat preflight module.

Part of the question needs to be do you want to preflight everything once it's a PDF or do you want to preflight native files before you go to the trouble of making a PDF?

There are good reasons to preflight a native file first, I personally prefer it. Although when automating workflows it isn't always practical (Unless you get into FlightCheck Online). So generally people use Callas pdfToolbox Server, CLI or the SDK or PitStop Server.

All of the core preflighting you need to do is built into Acrobat Pro. Much of the edits you would find yourself doing can be done with Acrobat and Illustrator/PhotoShop. PitStop would be the tool to use for heavy editing, no two ways about it. pdfToolbox is a bridge between the two, Acrobat and PitStop with numerous added features.