I can't imagine doing prepress without Pitstop these days. I'm sure you have to figure out all kinds of ways to do what needs to be done. 

Glad you got it sorted. 

You probably deserved it. 

Primary

My wife is a Realtor - "master bedroom" is frowned upon by the industry. 

He's over on the Dark Side boards. Used to work for Kodak, I think. Basically knows everything.

Sorry to being this back on topic. I've used JPEG maximum quality as my pdf export setting for many years and it's fine for most work.

Where you may see undesirable results is if they have type or logos that are raster and you will see some of the artifacting around the edges.

I think Gordo pretty much debunked the idea that a jpeg re-saved loses quality several years ago. I wouldn't do it a hundred times, but editing one and re-saving as JPEG is fine. I prefer doing "save as" so I can set the quality to max.

Sometimes you just have to show them how shitty it looks with their bad data for them to understand. 

We'll get good data files right around the time we start to get good art files. 

In other words, never. 

I'm still not clear on how Pitstop would help. If you're just doing a search it seems like it is more work than just using Acrobat search. 

I'm quite curious, myself!

The 3 prepress operators should switch computers for a week and see if the problem follows the operator or stays with the computer. That could point to a software setting somewhere. 

Reason I ask is if it's a one time thing, you can go to page 1, see the name and then search for it which will tell you what pages it is on. Note the pages, build a csv with that info. When done, use the list and whatever vdp you have to show the pages as needed. Painful, but possible. 

Along the same lines, I wonder if you can export or save all the text from the pdf and do the same thing. Should be faster to search but might be tricky to figure out which page it is on.

Getting a real report would be best 

I would think there's gotta be a way to get a spreadsheet report.

Is this a one-time thing or something that you need to do regularly?

What format is the document in? If it were a csv or Excel you could sort it.

If it's a PDF, not sure what to tell you. The only software I know of that can peer into a pdf for specific data and do something based on what it finds is Quadient Inspire, which is an extremely expensive variable data package.  

I don't miss it that much.

Prinect is okay. Interestingly, I learned that it was created by some of the same people behind Prinergy. Seems like it behaves more like Apogee, though.