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!

Here at the Markzware Blog, we like to keep a eye on anything conversion or preflight in the graphic arts marketplace. Heck, we even get into aviation from time-to-time, when blogging on a Friday! Today’s post is not quite about flying, but none-the-less an interesting preflight tool:

PODi Releases CheckPPML_Pro Variable Data Preflight Solution

PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, today announced the release of CheckPPML_Pro. This production “preflight” tool enables proofing, viewing, preflight and validation of properly formed PPML/GA files. PPML (the Personalized Print Markup Language) facilitates creating personalized high volume print campaigns by service providers, enabling meaningful one-to-one “conversations” for their customers.

Early users report that CheckPPML_Pro is up to 20 times faster than the free version of CheckPPML, while retaining its easy-to-use interface. “CheckPPML_Pro ran our (large) files in about 3 minutes, instead of two hours (with a prior solution); and the output looks good.” said Ray Niblett of Shutterfly.
Source: http://www.printingnews.com/

Variable data printing is of course still one of the growth areas in printing, thus great to see some good, new-fashioned preflighting being built-in!