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)

Save FreeHand! They call themselves FREE FreeHand, but let’s face it, when you are up against such factors as ex Macromedia and the mighty Adobe, a miraculous “save” (I guess they would settle for an effective “import”) comes to mind…
http://www.freefreehand.org/

Yes, you read it correctly. I guess there are a lot of Spaniards on their list, for last I heard, Spain was one place that would not give up their favorite vector drawing app that easily.

FlightCheck supports preflighting FreeHand 11.0 (MX) down to version 7. Although not on our short-list for other file formats to add to our new indexing, search and text extraction technology, PageZephyr, it would also make sense to be added here in the future.

Free Freehand aims actually state this VERY PROBLEM that legacy files pose and Markzware, with it’s file format conversion knowledge, often helps solve:

“We want FreeHand to have a future. Not only because we love to work with it, but also because we have thousands of files from the past we may need access to on any given occasion (well, they open in AI, but are converted into chaos).” SOURCE: http://www.freefreehand.org/index.shtml  Read more... (572 words, 1 image, estimated 2:17 mins reading time)

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)

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.”

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)

Here is an excellent article on how designers and creators can better deal with their printing job providers called, “A Mistake Was Made–Kill the Printer!” Firstly, I learned of this via Linkedin.com from a post to the PrintPlant “Linkedin-group” via fellow member,  Bill Ruesch. (Who said social media was not useful?) I include the numbered points from this article on how to better work with your printer, which will hit home to many. One way to avoid problems is to preflight, using FlightCheck . Read on…

A Mistake Was Made–Kill the Printer!
The question of giving a supplier the boot comes up from time-to-time. Before doing something rash, like firing a previously reliable printer, you should ask yourself  some important questions:  Read more... (741 words, estimated 2:58 mins reading time)

Often just preflighting alone is not enough and here was an interesting post about an issue with Adobe’s InDesign Live Preflighting, which also brings up a good point about preflighting in general:

“Every linked file with a forward or backward slash won’t get collected and will even crash InDesign. I know… I know… you never use slashes in a file-name, right? Well neither do I. But that actually makes it even more dangerous because it’s not something I’m thinking about when I’m creating artwork and I always receive a lot of files from third parties.”
Source: http://www.graphicstart.com/item.php?itemid=1040443

The point being, this bug aside which surely will get fixed- you can better check everything that comes in, perhaps even with a stand-alone tool, such as FlightCheck Professional. The advantage there is FlightCheck can check the native images and files stand-alone, without the need to open Illustrator or Photoshop, for instance. We even have a little movie about using FlightCheck to check images:

Preflight Checking a batch of Images with FlightCheck

Gotta love Twitter. Caught a RT (Re-Tweet) on Twitter just moments ago where someone was asking if this resource and link here from Adobe (script) was preflight. Well, no, it appears not- just a collect of package script, which could be very useful. Here is how it looked in Twitter:

@colorburned RT's @r27 about preflight wishes in Illustrator

@Markzware informs via 2x RT about FlightCheck for Illustrator

Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional or Designer can also package up the job with all linked images and used fonts AND provide a full preflight of the Illustrator file. Not to mention, it can also check 50+ other file formats. OK, just thought I’d share that. Have a great one- finally feeling like spring around here !

One last pict and once again the cool thing about Twitter, when you actively Tweet. @r27 shared our answer with his “followers” – Cool:

“Zevrix Solutions has announced compatible versions of its plug-ins with Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 software. Zevrix makes plug-ins for InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

InPreflight is a quality control tool for InDesign that manages file packaging and reporting. Its latest release is 2.6.1.”
SOURCE: http://www.macworld.com/

You can read the full article here.

Mistakes do happen. Fonts, color and images quality are the prime culprits that damage smooth print workflows. These problems are just some of the topics covered as part of the Graphic Arts Institute [GAI] training program in San Francisco.

Located in the Northern California Print Center, which also is home to the Printing Industries of Northern California [PINC] and a number of other print-related businesses, the GAI’s in-plant uses a four-color 20-inch Heidelberg Speedmaster press to produce fliers, brochures, booklets and envelopes printed in print runs up to 8,000 units. Many of these printed pieces include information about PINC’s and GAI’s health program and health insurance program.

The GAI offers printing companies the opportunity to broaden their employees’ experience with electronic prepress, press and Web technologies. Along with the 20-inch press, the facility houses more than 30 computers, state-of-the-art software and a Creo CTP platesetter driven by a Delta RIP.

Michale Carling, executive director of the GAI, believes preflighting is an important first step toward eliminating print mistakes. One of the tools used at the GAI is Markzware’s FlightCheck. “We look for problems with fonts, images, CMYK vs. RGB and difficult gradients,” says Carling. The examination begins with a check of native files created by staff and students. Using FlightCheck is part of the training that students receive at the GAI facility.  Read more... (865 words, estimated 3:28 mins reading time)