FlightCheck Professional v6.5 – Customer Workflow & Testimonial

“FlightCheck is our safe-guard. Through its customizable ground controls we are able to flag potential problems with all placed elements before they get to the final QC process. I would recommend FlightCheck to others. A company’s digital assets in the world of print are its most important. FlightCheck confirms and guards the integrity of files and ensures that there will be no printability concerns in the final product.”
Shawn Vazinski, Production Manager
Lachina Publishing Services

From: Shawn Vazinski <xxxxx@lachina.com>
Date: March 8, 2010 10:44:55 PM
To: Mary Gay <pr@markzware.com>
Subject: Re: Markzware/FlightCheck

1. So, tell us a little about yourself.  Please provide your company name and location along with your professional title .
As Production Manager for Lachina Publishing Services in Cleveland, Ohio, my duties range on a daily basis, from making assignments, balancing workflow, managing technology initiatives, enhancing productivity through better software practices or trying new things, and talking with the staff about any issues they are facing technologically or otherwise.

2.  How did you get started in this industry
I started in the graphic-design industry first as a print design art director, but really started into publishing as a production manager working on periodicals.  Read more... (842 words, 2 images, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)

A lot of anniversaries this year. Last week we got reminded of InDesign’s presence on our computers for 10 years! Before this, we saw that Adobe Photoshop has been with us 20 years. Earlier this year, we posted about how Desktop Publishing and its subsequent revolutionary effects on print communication turns twenty-five in two-thousand-and-ten (DTP Turns 20) and now we learn this:

Dot-com marks 25th anniversary

(CNN) “It was 25 years ago — March 15, 1985 — that the first dot-com domain name — Symbolics.com — appeared on the Internet, ushering in the commercial age of the World Wide Web.”

It is also the 10th anniversary of the dot-com-bubble bursting. There is a lot of convergence this year, which is very interesting (Let’s call that content convergence) . What is wild, is the fact that ALL of these products, services or events sharing these anniversaries are inter-connected.

Wow, what a year! There is at least one other anniversary this year… any guess which product that is for?

First we realized Desktop Publishing itself turns 25 this year, then it was Photoshop that also turns 20 in 2010 and now this:

Adobe InDesign 10 Years on the Creative Desktop!

http://www.indesign10anniversary.com/

Need to preflight or convert to or from Adobe InDesign, then Markzware is your source to free your content. Adobe InDesign Plug-ins and world-class applications that have been with InDesign and DTP every step of the way… Markzware.

Happy birthday InDesign!

Markzware is know for it’s invention of preflighting and of course the stand-alone application FlightCheck Professional. Markzware is also very popular for our easy-to-use desktop publishing conversion Plugins, XTensions and applications. Here is a small overview:

Q2ID – QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign – 199 – Macintosh/Windows
A great Plug-in for any Adobe InDesign user. With one click, open your QuarkXPress documents right within Adobe InDesign; the complete layout, ready to edit and use! Adobe CS4 Plugin or CS3.

ID2Q - InDesign to Quark XTension – 199 – Macintosh/Windows
A great tool for any QuarkXPress users, as there is a growing number of InDesign files. With one click, open your InDesign documents right within Quark; the complete layout, ready to edit and use!

PUB2ID – Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign – 199  – Macintosh/Windows
A CS3 or CS4 plugin which makes getting MSPub files into InDesign simple as can be!

MarkzTools 8 – Recovers bad Quark files – 199 – Macintosh
An XTension QuarkXPress 8 (Quark 7 version also available.) which can keep your files in good order, allow you to down-save to a lower version and can most amazingly fix or recover bad or corrupted Quark files, most of the time!  Read more... (347 words, 1 image, estimated 1:23 mins reading time)

Developing for proprietary file formats is much like breaking codes or being a Cryptologist. Cryptography is a very interesting study, dating back to the Greeks usage of transposition ciphers, but surely was used long before that by Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Thus it was with interest that we read this WSJ article titled, “Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code” about this man who broke a 200 year old coded message sent in 1801 by Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to then-president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who has patents and inventions which included the portable copy press, also dabbled in secret code (The Wheel Cipher):

“Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.”
SOURCE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html

What more creative way to kick off your Monday morning graphic designers, publishers and print professionals than with this little invention history from one of the founding fathers of the United States!  Read more... (253 words, 2 images, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

No need to spend thousands just to mine text content
from Desktop Publishing file archives any longer!

Liberate YOUR content locked up inside expensive native applications such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and Microsoft Publisher with this exciting new and simple search engine for your Desktop Publishing layouts and texts:

Look at it like Google for your DTP layouts or a simple Digital Asset Management (DAM) search and find application. This new search-engine goes beyond simple searching, but provides advanced queries and text mining. You also can extract text from .INDD or .QXP material, with a simple click to RTF or up to a WordPress blog! See:

http://pagezephyr.com

You can get a demo here:

http://bit.ly/5BMOLN

Great for book, magazine and newspaper publishers, content managers, eDiscovery technicians, scientific discovery, editors, journalists, prepress operators and many others. Have archives or detailed InDesign or Quark files? Yes, then you will want to try this demo today!

— — — Democratize your Content — — — —> Search | Edit | Extract —> PageZephyr

Twitter is a great resource for learning about layout software and technology in general, not too mention much more. So when I saw this new micro search engine called Twendly.com, my very first thought was who is Tweeting the most about Adobe InDesign. The answer is:

The Most Active Twitter Accounts Talking About: InDesign

@indesignstorm is first and he (Chuck Green – IdeaBook) is a great person to follow on graphic design and general Adobe issues for sure. @creativetechs (CreativeTech Training) had a great second place showing, which kind of surprised me. It was of course also great to see @Markzware right up there in the thick of things in the third position.

EDIT after publishing: I started this post yesterday and it appears to index not whom has done, say, the most Tweets about the key-word term over time, but more on a per-day or certain time period basis. For instance today @aj_wood (http://ajwood.com/)is in top position, whom is another great educator! Markzware feel to 4th place, darn – well anyway, furthermore, this tool is still in beta and surely there are many fine Tweets, like those from @rufusd [web page: http://rufus.deuchler.net/]which are not indexed yet… See their FAQ:  Read more... (257 words, 1 image, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)

On Apple’s web page under Mac OS X productivity tools, you can see the new and exciting tool from Markzware, PageZephyr- perfect for publishers of all sorts (Book, magazine and newspaper publishing houses) or of course anyone with archives of DTP files which need to be easily searchable. This Macintosh application allows you to search your entire drive or network full of Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress documents, WITHOUT opening them.. and so much more, like extraction:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/pagezephyr.html

—> Do not forget to preflight and then check again your application print files with Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional v6.5. Supporting more than 50 file formats, it takes quality control in the publishing workflow to the next level…

- Here was a great article about PageZephyr over on TechNewsWorld, with deeper insights into the desktop search and extraction capabilities this technology and app offers for proprietary page layout documents like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress; expanding where Spotlight stops. Here is just a sniplet from this detailed and insightful piece titled, “PageZephyr Sees What Spotlight Can’t“:

“Considering the length of time programs like Quark and InDesign have been in the market and the key role search plays in almost every facet of computer use, one might think a program like PageZephyr would have been introduced long ago, but it wasn’t.”
SOURCE: http://www.technewsworld.com

See full story here:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68966.html

With Markzware’s new desktop search engine for page layout file formats such as Adobe INDD and Quark QXP just out, makes this article all the more interesting:

Five “Real Time” Search Startups You Should Know

“For the past few years, there have been many ways to navigate the web to find out what is going on right now.  You could go to cnn.com to see breaking news, or you could perform a search at Google news to search multiple media outlets.  However, while media outlets aren’t able to cover every story, the power of the internet enables most every story to be discussed.  From this, the real time web was born.”
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-five-real-time-startups-you-need-to-know-2009-12

They mention several cool new Internet based search engines such as Sency and Topsy. So if Internet users are getting real-time search, why not you graphic designers, advertising agencies, publishing houses, printers and marketing departments able to search their DTP (Desktop Publishing) documents with ease and in a split second on their desktop?  Read more... (248 words, estimated 60 secs reading time)