Read over on PrintWeek an interesting development in the area of “preflighting,” which will be shown in May at IPEX 2010 in the UK. Interesting, for we have been saying for years just demanding a PDF file in a certain flavor does not work:

Enfocus unveils PitStop Connect pre-flighting tool

Barney Cox, printweek.com, 09 March 2010
Enfocus has launched PitStop Connect – a software tool that printers can supply to clients to ensure files are produced to their specification so that there are “no more headaches” for creatives.
Source: http://www.printweek.com/PreMediaWeekly

The reason it is even more interesting, is for the fact that preflighting does not start with checking a PDF!  No, it starts with checking native artwork and Quark, InDesign or Illustrator layouts. That is what FlightCheck Professional and it’s exportable Ground Controls or preflight profiles offer. The ability to share what to check for, BEFORE a PDF is created. The fact that just jamming a PDF spec down the throats of the designers has not worked, as you’ll read in the article, also does not surprise me, for we have been seeing and saying that all along! We read in part:  Read more... (500 words, 4 images, estimated 2:00 mins reading time)

Was reading this CNN article on an 1808 personal letter from the 3rd US president found by a college student studying to be a historian, which reminded me of the many inventions that Thomas Jefferson, “principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776)”[source] made; some of which are directly in the print and copy trade:

“Historians had been aware of the existence of the letter, thanks to Jefferson’s use of a portable copying press, one of his many inventions. But its physical whereabouts had been unknown.”
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/04/jefferson.letter/index.html

So what is this “Jefferson’s portable copying press”?

“Jefferson invented the portable copying press when his overseas travel called for a compact version of the copying press previously invented by James Watt. In the original copying machine, one wrote with ink on a copper plate which could then produce numerous copies; Jefferson praised this enthusiastically because of how well it facilitated record-keeping and correspondence and subsequently sought to improve it. Jefferson designed a lap desk which would hold all the essentials of his day, from a thermometer to pencils to a nightcap, as well as his portable copying press.”
Source: http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/invent.html
Note: Jefferson did not invent this, but improved on it really. This image is of James Watt copying press, 1780 patent diagram, of which Thomas Jefferson improved and worked closely with…  Read more... (377 words, 3 images, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

70% of PDFs and files for print have Job-Stopping errors Costing millions in reproduction.

“Quality is everyone’s responsibility”

W. Edwards Deming

Would an airplane pilot ever take-off without performing a preflight check? The answer is “no.” Then why would you drop your PDFs into your publishing workflow without performing a thorough preflight? Thousands of Markzware customers rely on FlightCheck every day to check their PDF or source print-files, such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop or QuarkXPress before they output (print or create PDF)/send off. Whether it is an open file type or a PDF, FlightCheck Professional will not only check for the Top Ten preflight problems but will scan your documents for literally hundreds of potential and costly output problems, even solving the issues for you. Best of all, encourage the use of FlightCheck throughout your extended workflow, as a PDF is only as good as the native or source files it is created from!

Whether it is hairlines or RGB colors, image compression or ink density of your PDF, FlightCheck will let you know. Stop the “Top-Ten Preflight Problems” today and start saving more!

Enfocus PitStop or Markzware FlightCheck?
Not sure. See: PitStop or FlightCheck…  Read more... (272 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Since ICANN, approved the use of non-Latin characters in domain names today, I thought we would stick on the Internet side with this post. Jörg Oyen, the publishing, Adobe and Quark QPS expert friend of ours over in Germany at Oyen.de, sent me a rather ominous Instant message on Skype the other day, “Do you like balls”? he asked. For some reason, I thought, “oh, must be Google Balls” for it sounds very Googlish (sp?) No, he meant Tagul balls or Tagul meta clouds. Here, you can see Jörg’s meta ball from his site here:

Here is the Markzware meta data cloud (no mystery here):

Beware! This Markzware cloud is not complete and this is limitation of Tagul only getting the first 350 keywords or something to that effect. We see FlightCheck in there, but no Q2ID or ID2Q, our popular Quark-to-InDesign and the other way around as well, conversion tools.

Want to see how we made this? Watch the video here, for good control over your meta data, keywords and general SEO is very important for graphic designers, publishers and printers alike (Yes, print-shops included!):

This was a very nice image that our Swiss distributor, Kursiv, designed for their FlightCheck Professional v6.5 Swiss German mailing. Check it out; and for those from Switzerland, you may want to see the text below, for there are some great offers on stand-alone preflighting for multiple desktop publishing file formats via FlightCheck:

Preflighting für (fast) alles

Sicherheit in der Produktion – das erreichen Sie durch standardisierte Arbeitsabläufe. Eingehende oder ausgehende Dokumente können auf Fehler untersucht werden. FlightCheck Pro prüft alle wichtigen Dokumentformate aus der Druckvorstufe – sogar ohne dass Sie über die Originalprogramme verfügen müssen.

FlightCheck Pro 6.5
FlightCheck Professional 6.5 ist die neueste Version von Markzware’s Preflighting Tool, welches sowohl offene Dokumentformate (XPress 3–8, InDesign bis CS4, Word, Illustrator, usw.) als auch Ausgabeformate wie EPS, PDF und PDF-X prüft.

FlightCheck Professional läuft als eigenständiges Programm, und Dokumente werden durch einfaches Drag-and-Drop auf das Programm-Icon geprüft. Dafür müssen die Originalprogramme nicht installiert sein. Flightcheck Pro generiert sofort einen vollständigen Report gemäss Ihren Einstellungen. Perfekt für Ihre AVOR.
FlightCheck Pro unterstützt auch eine Batchverarbeitung mehrerer Dateien, und lässt sich durch Presets einfach für verschiedene Aufgaben konfigurieren.  Read more... (270 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

In this “making of” the AMERICAN PRINTER TV crew film an interview with Patrick Marchese, Co-founder and CEO of Markzware and a subsequent demonstration of some new, exciting desktop search technology, for indexing and extracting your desktop publishing formats, such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, from this well know preflight (FlightCheck) and conversion (Quark to InDesign) software developer… more below, but first the video:

Patrick tells us what PageZephyr, the name of this new technology is and briefly what it does. Doug Rosen shows how it works and I stuck in the middle there a small SnapzPro captured demo of some of the key functions of PageZepher. In a nut-shell, it is:

Index, Search, View, Extract and Distribute

QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign Content -

Partial Transcript:

Gonna do a video demonstration for American PrinterTV on the new PageZephyr…. the filming of, the making of… Basically start with your name… are you ready Doug, getting nervous? No more nervous than normal!

OK, whenever your ready (says the camera man to Patrick)…

Hi my name is Pat Marchese with Markzware and I’m here to introduce a brand new product by the name of PageZephyr (PageZepher). What PageZephyr is, is a reader for Quark, InDesign and soon Publisher PageMaker and other document types.  Read more... (638 words, estimated 2:33 mins reading time)

Having a little fun, while checking out the PRINT 09 show floor with Markzware in Chicago. We are searching for Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress users and of course those that have heard of us, Markzware and the new FlightCheck Professional v6.5! We also announced a new search engine technology called PageZephyr at this print-show which will examine, preview and let you extract content from many popular desktop layout formats. Look at it like a way to preview InDesign text stories, without the need for Adobe Creative suite, as an example.

Pat Berger of Mercer Color corporation, winner of the recent AMERICAN PRINTER’s first annual Environmental Excellence Awards, stops at PRINT 09 in Chicago to share with us how he uses preflight software application, FlightCheck, Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion plugin) and what he thought of the new PageZephyr (PageZepher) technology, to index, make searchable and extractable, Quark, InDesign and other proprietary file content at the Markzware booth-Pat Berger of Mercer Color on Markzware at PRINT 09:

Preflighting with FlightCheck Professional v6.5

Jon Warner from Trade Press Media Group talks to us at PRINT 09 in this video on how he uses FlightCheck Professional AND Adobe Acrobat to preflight his incoming files for their print workflow. He uses both; but prefers FlightCheck (for everything first) due to it’s ease-of-use and support of more than 50 file formats such as InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, PDF and others. Much more effective to preflight before outputting to PDF:

In the last segment, you see Doug Rosen, Markzware project manager, going into some advanced details with Jon on font search paths for helping optimize your font preflighting in FlightCheck. FlightCheck Professional v6.5 is now shipping with CS4 and Quark8 support. See:
http://www.markzware.com/flightcheck_…

The reason it was so great to hear Jon’s comments, is that some out there in the graphic arts industry, or what is it called now, “print media“, like to think that it is best to funnel this multi-step process called preflight to the very end of the workflow and even some are trying to automate preflight checking. It is however, largely a human process which requires a simple checklist to work best and should be done at every step in the graphics workflow where the layout file switches hands or is due to be output (see preflight defined). As Dr. Demming said on quality assurance,

“Quality is everyone’s responsibility.”

From the show floor of PRINT 09, we post you this interesting film-

Xerox DirectMail on the “Prepress for Digital Printing” Book and retro FlightCheck; a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkj70fyy-CI

Transcript:
How many of you remember this one? Why fight it, preflight it! With FlightCheck. Now this is an old one, going a little bit retro here. I don’t know from when this was exactly, probably about 1999 and maybe even earlier, like 97, or 1996 But anyway that brings us to the next subject of today which is a little letter I got a nice direct mail piece, nice to see that. Not only was it a direct mail piece it was personalized and it came from no other than Xerox.

BREAKING- since this video was made, FlightCheck 6.5 with QuarkXPress 8 and CS4 or Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat and thus PDF support is now shipping! Save one hundred when purchasing here!