"PDF has become the standard for file delivery, but still one in four files fail pre-flight, which is a huge proportion," said Enfocus's director of product development, Elli Cloots.

"They fail for the same reasons as always, low-res images, fonts not embedded, RGB images, transparency, spot colours and trim size."

Cloots added that, despite the PDF/X standard and the Ghent PDF Workgroup's development of best-practice guidelines, there were still problems.

"There is still something missing – communication between printers and creatives is still complicated," she said. "Creatives find it hard to find correct PDF settings and production problems mean nothing to them."

She added that for infrequent customers, supplying PDFs a couple of times a year, the cost of educating them in correct file supply was prohibitive, hence the need for automation to ensure their files are supplied correctly.

"Printers are spending a huge amount of time communicating settings; now they no longer have to and the specification is under their control," she said. "And there are no more headaches for the creatives."

Printers can use the €3,999 (£3,630) software to create what the firm calls Connectors. These are desktop utilities that contain the correct PDF settings and automatically route the file to the print service provider.

The user simply drops a file onto the Connector. They can be branded by print company and also enable files to be encrypted to prevent them being used to create files to send to third parties.