Why Fight it, Preflight it- with FlightCheck; why edit PDF?
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!
You can see here the personalization (Nice to see them using VDP or Variable Data Printing software in real-life!), it say’s, “here is the book that can really help Markzware do more with less” and we see the date there July 22 2009. What is interesting, I just got it today, about the 20th of August. Today is the 21st so it took a little while to get here, for whatever reason but anyway when you read the content and see the book you will realize it’s not than bad. No doubt it is tough times for everyone in the industry and this book is really going to help you. I must say it is quiet a nice little book and I must recommend you sign up for it, I think I signed up on Xerox’s webpage some months ago to honest with you, a matter you fact you know, quite a long time ago but I believe it was this year. It is written by this these gentlemen here and edited and foreword by Peter Muir as we know also writes preflighting books.
What is interesting is you just turn right in there to chapter one and it is basically all about preparing your files for the print service provider and print provider and it is a great book. It talks about all different elements how to create proper postscript, yes that is right it gets into Adobe Postscript there. You know this got me thinking these icons look a little dated but the rest of the information is all really still quiet valid. For instance we get into the scanning resolution, here we see another preflight issue with images, here is the high res image and there below it is how it looks, lo-res it may be hard to see with this camera but that is what happens when you use a 72 dpi space image instead of a proper 300 dpi high resolution image. Then they get into design issues, which of course gets in all the different spread and choke all those type of bleed issues which are very important. Then I was quiet happy to get in to chapter 4, the printing issues, no sorry, that important as well. Particular if you have a iGen or another digital press .
What really got me was chapter 6 the Preflight section. They have got a whole section there just on preflight and we see this guy here, just freaking out you know, properly the preflight operator. It talks about manual pre flighting, good post script excreta , excreta, but then what is nicest of all they mention Markzware , FlightCheck , so that was quiet nice but once again on closer examination this is a old screen shot , version 4.5 we are on version 6 almost coming out 6.5 of FlightCheck professional with CS4 and Quark 8 support which everyone has been waiting for. And again you know how to create a PDF file and should you send your native file in or not,, talking about express 5 , creating a print ready file excreta, excreta, You know then once again the book should be titled preflight because here we go on page 67 reason output fails, missing font, graphics problems basically all of your general preflight issues. Image, colour space, excreta, excreta. So it was all quiet interesting and it got me thinking.
Wait a minute the letter says July 2009 from the senior vice president Valentin Govaerts from production and Graphic arts Xerox Europe, what’s going on here? Well if you look real closely down here you will see the print date is 2005 but that would be hard to see, 2005 copy right date Xerox Corporation printed on a Xerox iGen 3 @ 110 Digital Production Press on 07 of 05 so printed right there in 2005 and at first I was a little bit shocked and then I realized it’s not that long ago , it’s four years ago. But most of this information is still valid of course the post script part you replace with creating a print-ready PDF (Why edit PDF when you can create it right the first time?!) which they are also covering here but the general problems, the general preflight issues are the same today as they were in 2005 and they were basically the same in 2005 as they were you know in 1997, 1996 when we had one of our first T- shits, it’s the same basic things, missing fonts or not embedded fonts, low res images, improper use of graphics, improper use of color spacing excreta.
So what’s great about Xerox, what they are doing here, times are tough, people have to be a little more frugal , a little bit think outside the box or maybe even think a little more inside the box and use stuff in the box like this older data here repurposing data in this case it is what Xerox is doing and taking advantage of it and making me quiet happy because it was quiet interesting to read and flip through this and I think you will like it as well. I’ll see if I can find a download link. It is properly available as a download somewhere and I will post it. So that is all I wanted to bring to your attention today this little Friday morning story for you, hope you have a great week end and don’t forget to check out our blogs on http://www.markzware.com/blogs we have a lot of fun and entertaining and educational information over there and once again this is David Dilling signing out for Markzware. Have a great day.
