Markzware poses this question for you:

What areas of digital files are most important when preflighting?  Colors, fonts, images? All of them? or something else?

Ted Smith, owner/art director at Ted Smith Creative Services responded by saying:

In pre-flighting any project, everything is of equal weight.  The lack of mis-linking of any part of the file can lead to poor if not disastrous results.

If I had to choose the LEAST important, it would be color.  Since most commercial printers have RIP software that it programmed specifically to their machines, having to convert or match colors is probably something that is going to occur anyway, regardless of the settings you may include. It is also the most subjective of elements, since no two people will see color exactly the same for physical, cultural or environmental reasons.  Also, the problems of ink versus pixels is an issue that few seem to grasp, despite numerous discussion (the old additive vs. subtractive color theory).

Fonts are very important, but can be worked around if there is a problem; substituting brand or even whole typefaces can be done with a little work. The WORST would have to be (short of the master file itself) the images; without them the whole job is dead in the water.  Read more... (1691 words, estimated 6:46 mins reading time)

Contact:
Mary Gay Marchese
949-756-5100, ext. 250
pr@markzware.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW PREFLIGHTING SOFTWARE – Offers Digital Printers, Publishers and Graphic Designers Complete Quality Control
Markzware FlightCheck® Professional Now Supports QuarkXPress 8 & Adobe CS4 Suite

SANTA ANA, California, August 28 , 2009 — Markzware (www.markzware.com), the recognized authority and inventor of preflighting, released a significant upgrade to its popular preflighting solution, FlightCheck Professional for Macintosh. In light of today’s economic challenges, Markzware is offering $100 off this latest version of  FlightCheck Professional v6.5  which has full support for the Adobe CS4 Creative Suite (including Adobe CS4 Design Standard and Adobe CS4 Design Premium) and QuarkXPress 8. This powerful upgrade gives printers, graphic designers and publishers the ability to preflight efficiently, avoiding costly production errors.

For well over a decade, the process of preflighting has been an important step for printers and prepress professionals worldwide.  Preflighting is the process that identifies and corrects missing items and errors in customer files before they become bigger and more costly problems further downstream in the printing process.  Read more... (793 words, estimated 3:10 mins reading time)

Adobe InDesign files and preflighting; an AdobeTV video by Rufus Deuchler:

“In this sixth episode of CSInsider|Design, I show the new Live Preflight feature in Adobe InDesign CS4. The term Preflight originates from the pre-flight checklists used by pilots prior to take off. In a publishing workflow, preflight is the process of checking a document for integrity and completeness, before it can move on in the workflow.” Source: http://graphicstart.com/item.php?f&itemid=1071437

He references a Wikipedia article which mentions this about preflight (postflight):

Pre-flighting is a term used in the printing industry to describe the process of confirming that the digital files required for the printing process are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and of the desired type. The term originates from the pre-flight checklists used by pilots. The term was first used in a presentation at the Color Connections conference in 1990 by consultant Chuck Weger.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-flight

Speaking of Chuck, watch what he has to say about this moment when he coined the term preflighting, to relate it to the quality control process in prepress and publishing at a show called Color Connections (late 80’s/early 90’s). Filmed in 2008 at the GraphExpo show :

 Read more... (194 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)

We are working hard on new features and functions for our preflight and conversion software and as such, are always glad to share other customer experiences, including with QXP, Adobe InDesign CS3 and Adobe InDesign CS4 (preflight a file without InDesign missing quality control checkpoints). You can also convert QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign and move content with the Q2ID plug in in InDesign.  Markzware has a nice growing list of video testimonials and also a page with customer quotes. We have taken some of the more interesting ones and highlighted them in this video:

Hi, I’m Khristyl Clerigo and I’m going to show you some of the most interesting Markzware product testimonials.

Let us hear what Shellie L. Hall of Ducktype Digital and Get Creative News has to say about FlightCheck Professional.

As a prepress professional I have spend many hours going through customers’ digital files one by one, checking for everything from fonts, to page size and image resolution to make sure the files would print correctly on press.  Read more... (671 words, estimated 2:41 mins reading time)

Wow — it has been over 15 years since I worked as a print production manager for a large advertising agency in California. Computer-To-Plate (CTP) was starting to garner industry buzz, and in my role, I had to best determine how to take digital creative files, produce them internally and ensure that once they were sent off to the printer or a publication, for example, they would work — meaning, they would render on press the way we expected them to and our clients, the advertisers, were pleased with the results.

Seemed like a simple enough challenge at the time, but what I soon discovered was that it was anything but.

It wasn’t as though the process was any more difficult than it was back in the “days of film.” At the agency, we had art directors who were mocking up layouts on boards that were turned over to me for recreation in QuarkXPress. After working with the art directors and others within the agency to make final tweaks to the ads, I then had to provide them with the assurance that what I was creating digitally would reproduce in the manner they expected, having the best print quality  and would result in quality image printing.  Read more... (1248 words, estimated 4:60 mins reading time)

Your in-plant is slick. You’ve got the latest and greatest in print engines and a stealthy prepress workflow. But, what good is it when the front end of the process is replete with bad files — customer – supplied content that’s poorly prepared and requires time and expense to fix?

This is a problem many printing organizations — and in-plants, instant print shops, large-format print suppliers (for large digital printing) and general commercial printing companies — face today. Content coming into many printing plants just isn’t good.

So, why do we have this pervasive, industry-wide gap in the workflow, now, more than a decade after CTP and digital workflow invaded the print marketplace? Perhaps a look back on “digital evolution” will shed some light.

Printing organizations led their customers into digital workflows, starting with the early adoption of CTP and digital prepress technologies. Print providers made good and sure that they were ready and able to process digital files before they asked for them from their customers.  Read more... (934 words, estimated 3:44 mins reading time)