For the recent Amsterdam InDesign User Group meeting, Markzware was going to donate a Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion Plug-in), but that would be too logical. So this time we got Gabriel Powell, Chairman of the Netherlands InDesign User Group,  a FlightCheck Professional v6.5, which can preflight 50+ file formats, as a stand-alone preflight and packaging tool, including Adobe Illustrator, PDF and of course InDesign. And the winner was… drum-roll please:

Peter van der Zon
Mediacollege Amsterdam
docent GV
(graphic arts teacher)

To learn more about what they discussed at that meeting and for future events about Adobe InDesign in Holland, see:
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/chapters/amsterdam/

They also offer a very informative and handy publication for their Dutch members:

“Het nIDug Magazine is het eerste digitale magazine dat gewijd is aan InDesign en de bloeiende gemeenschap van InDesign professionals in Nederland.”

InDesign Dutch Forum:

http://www.indesignusergroup.nl/forum/punbb/

We have seen the ROI and value preflighting adds to the design-to-print workflow in chart form, now let’s hear from a real user. In this case, it is from Randy Jamerson, Prepress systems administrator for EBSCO Media.

Located in Birmingham, Alabama EBSCO Media is one of the largest full-service sheetfed printers in the country. More info on their operation at the end, now onto how they use FlightCheck:

“FlightCheck has evolved into a very robust and customizable product.  For example, if your workflow automatically converts RGB to CMYK and honors tagged profiles, you can customize FlightCheck so that it does not flag these as error conditions.“

Randy Jamerson, EBSCO Media

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

From: Randy Jamerson
Date: February 19, 2010 4:57:23 PM GMT+01:00
To: Mary Gay <pr A_T markzware.com>
Subject: Re: Markzware/Congratulations/Questions for blog

Here are some thoughts that maybe you can use in your blog.

I was hired at EBSCO Media to be the first “Preflight” person in 1994. We
didn’t have FlightCheck and desktop publishing programs ( Quark and
Pagemaker) at that time had non-existent or very rudimentary tools for
preflight.  Every image and graphic file associated with a job had to be
individually scrutinized. When FlightCheck arrived, it was one of those
“greater than sliced bread” events.  Read more... (586 words, 1 image, estimated 2:21 mins reading time)

Close to fifteen years on the same question arises, time and time again, with regards to quality control in the design to print process:

Where is the best place to preflight the art-work or print layout?

Stop a preflight problem in an element at the design stage, it may only set you back $10€; that same problem on the press will cost you potentially $thousands€. This chart answers that age-old question pretty clearly and shows how simple preflight controls can greatly improve your ROI. Preflighting is not a process just ‘done by someone else’ in the manufacturing of your designs you want to take flight in the form or a printed piece. It should be done throughout in the workflow, time and time again. Just ask Toyota and their recent huge recall of Prius automobilies due to faulty brake software.

Naturally each workflow varies, often greatly, but as a rule of thumb, you should preflight with tools like FlightCheck Professional v6.5 just before you are about to:

A) Send off to another party to work further on the layout or design
B) Before using received  artwork from other sources
C) Whenever something is unsure or elements “act-up” in the layout
D) (before) Output or Export to PDF or Print
E) Postflight the resulting/received print PDF file
 Read more... (341 words, 1 image, estimated 1:22 mins reading time)

There is a great discussion going on in the Group of Prepress, Print & Color Management Professionals over on Linkedin, started by Cindy (Bailey) Wingo, where in short she asked:

“What are the industry standards for producing clean, RIPpable files?” … “What is the industry standard for excellence in pre-flighting files?“

Source: Group of Prepress, Print & Color Management Professionals

Great replies, but it is the last post, which I will start with; which is the summary as far as quality-minded design and publishing users are concerned with, in the overall workflow process to printed output:

“Preflighting should happen even before the PDF is even created. Bad files make bad PDFs. That’s why programs such as FlightCheck are so invaluable.“

Source: David Creamer via the Group of Prepress, Print & Color Management Professionals

This was in response to the usual postflighting options mentioned for later stage PDF’s and the likes. This is fine and true, as a step right before the RIP, but not the entire truth; actually far from it. You need to Preflight FIRST before even making a PDF print-file. What was encouraging was the facts brought forth by industry expert (I.D.E.A.S Training) and certified Adobe and Quark trainer, David Creamer and our own Mary Gay (Pettit) Marchese, for this is the way to make a publishing and print workflow truly flow.  Read more... (501 words, 2 images, estimated 2:00 mins reading time)

We all have our mental or even physical check-lists for preparing print files and hopefully you use a true preflight software to help with that process. (Preflighting is helpful for a print checklist or printable checklists). Here is a good check list, in this article titled, “Digital Prepress Checklist.” This one section of it, is what I wanted to highlight:

Design & Pre-Press Checklist:

• Do not use Publisher or Quark. Stick to Adobe Products.
• Remember, Photoshop is for photos. Illustrator is for illustrations. InDesign is for Page Layout.
• Do not enlarge images beyond 120% of original size when placing it in your document.
• Do not use images downloaded from Google. Read second sections of post.
• Do not use compression methods (i.e. LZW or JPEG) on placed images for output.
• Do not use RGB images whenever possible. Convert them to CMYK.

Source: http://www.printedbyerik.com/2009/11/digital-prepress-checklist/

Wow. Is this someone Adobe sponsors or did I miss the boat and is Quark no longer used by thousands and thousands of publishers and layout artists? In any event good tips for the rest and, we offer data conversion tools for ALL of the above. If it is in InDesign you need to be from a Quark or Microsoft Publisher file, then just check these tools out, including our newly released search and extraction tool for page layout content:  Read more... (283 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

Let’s just get right to the educational feature film and then below some all important postflight, pardon the pun, commentary. Here is the nicely prepared tutorial titled, “Analyzing and Preflighting Adobe Acrobat PDF Files For Print“:

Great job by http://www.envisionprinting.com/ in highlighting these technical prepress issues and how to tackle finding them in Adobe Acrobat. OK, but did you notice that most of the items he was checking for, are best checked and corrected well before the PDF stage? The main issues were:

* Non embedded Fonts (missing fonts in native file)
* RGB images instead of CMYK
* Low Resolution Images

These common issues and more would have to be fixed by the graphic designer, back within their native files*. Yes, it is utterly important to check the Acrobat PDF you have created, however, by first preflighting and then creating a PDF, you will be ahead of the game. Not only that, but tools like FlightCheck Professional will not only check Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, etc, but also the resulting PDF through one VERY easy to use drag-and-drop interface. Furthermore, you can also package all fonts and images together for archiving or compressing and sending to someone else the full job; it will even preflight Adobe Acrobat, check a PDF and collect non-embedded fonts used but not placed within a PDF!  Read more... (239 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)

Preflight oder Postflight

PREFLIGHT
Prozess des Analysierens von nativen Dateien bevor sie in einen Prepress-Workflow eingespeist werden. Damit wird sichergestellt, dass die Daten für den jeweiligen Verwendungszweck aufbereitet sind. (Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Microsoft Publisher, etc)

POSTFLIGHT
Prozess des Analysierens von bereits verarbeiteten Daten (PostScript, PDF, DCS2, etc.) zur Qualitätskontrolle in einem digitalen Prepress-Workflow.

MARKZWARE
Markzware bietet Ihnen sowohl Preflighting von nativen Daten wie auch Postflighting von PDF-Daten in verschiedenen Ausführungen (unterstützt mehr als 40 Dateiformate.) Was auch immer Sie tun, am besten stellen Sie sicher, dass das Preflighting in Ihrem Arbeitsablauf so früh wie möglich geschieht.

http://www.markzware.com/preflight/

— — —>

FlightCheck PROFESSIONAL v6.5 NEU !

Desktop Preflighting und Postflighting mit dem mehrfach preisgekrönten selbstständigen klassischen Programm.

• PDF/X, Pass4Press und andere PDF Ground Control Sets
• Native Dateien-Ground Controls
• In deutscher, englischer, französischer und niederländischer Sprache
• Mac OS X, Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1
• Führt Sie zu einem spezifischen Problem in ihrer Datei
• Funktion „Job sammeln“ ermöglicht es Ihnen, alle Datei-Elemente in einem Ordner zu sammeln
• Einfach zu benutzen und Sie werden schnell davon profitieren!

Eine Vollversion kostet € 499 (Special limited Price nu €399). Mehrfachlizenzen sind möglich.  Read more... (249 words, estimated 60 secs reading time)

I love analogies and here is one that was a perfect fit for FlightCheck Professional or preflighting in the generic:

RT @OphieLuStudios @aj_mitchell: Oops…New highway ramp too steep. To be torn down and rebuilt at Design firm’s expense. http://bit.ly/8kstZd

Construction or laying out roads is no different than designing a new newspaper or yearbook layout in Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress or Microsoft Publisher. Yes, perhaps the costs and processes are different, but I would guess the percentage in terms of money is similar. Re-working costs time and money. First preflight than PDF. The original article says:

“The brand-new never-opened Fairfax Road offramp of westbound Highway 178 must be demolished and rebuilt because of a design flaw, the Bakersfield public works department confirmed Monday.”
Source: http://www.kget.com/news/local/story/New-Hwy-178-ramp-is-huge-safety-issue-1-million/

“Design flaw.” Graphic designers have had it pretty good with printers really. Did you notice in the article that the “design firm” had to pay the nearly 1 million dollar fee to re-do it all? A good prepress department is worth it’s weight in gold really. (And gold is expensive these days!)

What is your favorite preflight analogy?  Read more... (209 words, 2 images, estimated 50 secs reading time)

There was a great tip, out of necessity really, about what is effectively a bug in Adobe Illustrator CS4, where Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional can be very handy to assist with. Here is a nice blog post from Bittbox.com which explains it best:

“If you’ve ever run into this annoying little Illustrator problem, it can be very frustrating, but it has a simple fix. Every so often you may find that no matter what color you select, Illustrator converts your selection to grayscale…”
Source: Illustrator 101: The Annoying Grayscale Color Problem

FlightCheck Professional can easily catch if your colors are set to Grayscale, RGB or CMYK. On top of that, FlightCheck can thus of course preflight AND package your entire Illustrator layout or design! Packaging includes all fonts used and placed images; all into a folder with a copy of the original .AI file, even compressing it! OK, back to how to fix this issue, which of course is simple and Bittbox has a nice graphic on how to do it on the link below, but in a nut-shell it is as easy as:  Read more... (278 words, 1 image, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

This was a very informative post over on the active Adobe InDesign Forum for Windows users titled, “Can’t open INDD files from Bridge or Windows Explorer.” This is similar to our report on the Macintosh side where certain InDesign files would not open, but a different sort of nasty little file association issue. User henweg reports:

Now, neither Bridge nor Windows Explorer recognizes InDesign files. I can still launch the program from the Start menu and Desktop shortcut, and I can open files from within the program. But Bridge says the default  for opening an INDD file is Acrobat…or Photoshop, Firefox or IE. Windows says the same. The INDD icon is no longer displayed in Windows Explorer either. It seems to have vanished from my system. I have tried to re-associate InDesign files with the program through Windows Explorer numerous times to no avail. Operating System: Windows XP Professional on a Dell GX270.

Is the only solution here to uninstall & reinstall InDesign? Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.
Source: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2283103

A few others reported the same thing with failed attempts to fix it. Until just recently we see this post, with a solution to the association problem they had and perhaps you are facing today. User dragonflynz answers:  Read more... (376 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)