Preflighting 101 - Part 3; FLIGHTCHECK Professional v6 Concepts- a. Ground Controls
Earlier this month, we presented you part three in a series of posts on preflighting titled, “Preflighting 101 - Part 2; Common Issues- Layout Problems.” Today we dive into more specifics on a electronic preflighting software in the form of, no surprise, FlightCheck Professional v6. In particular about the all important Ground Control settings:
FlightCheck Professional Ground Controls - Images Section
IIII. FLIGHTCHECK Professional v6 Concepts
IIII a. Ground Controls
FlightCheck Professional preflighting software by Markzware is a stand-alone application that electronically preflights numerous types of files in mere seconds. These file formats include QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Adobe PDF, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and several others- not to mention individual image formats. The first step of preflighting with FlightCheck is setting up the Ground Controls. The Ground Controls enable you to tell FlightCheck how it should inform you about the document being checked. By default (The “Default Settings”) the Ground Control settings have many items checked to “on”, which you may not need to worry about.
FlightCheck gathers large amounts of information about the DTP document. The Ground Controls allow you to tell FlightCheck what possible problems you need to know about, and what guidelines it should use to identify what is considered a potential problem. You can set each item to be flagged as either a “Error” (red), “Warning” (blue) or to be ignored by simply not checking it at all.
Ground Control sets can be created for different types of documents, different types of output environments, and specific applications. We even have different FlightPlans- one for non-PDF types and another one for PDF files; so that you can have the exact terminology on the reports and accurate information. You can also create a set of Ground Controls that will be used with any document created by a specific application. For example, you can create a set of Ground Controls and tell FlightCheck to use the set every time an InDesign document is preflighted. Different Ground Control sets can also be set for different types of jobs and selected before the documents are preflighted. For example, the Ground Controls for a two-color document will most likely have a different set of criteria than that of a six-color document. Similarly, if your document will be output in an OPI environment, it will have different requirements than if it is to be output with embedded high-resolution images.
This last example warrants some additional attention. In an OPI or FPO (For Placement Only) environment, the images that are placed in the document are low-resolution. These images are then exchanged for high-resolution images when the document is output. When setting up Ground Controls for OPI environment, it is important to ignore certain errors and stress the importance of others. One error that should be ignored is the use of low-resolution image in the document for any manipulation that has occurred within the page layout application. If a low-resolution OPI image is altered in the page layout application, the changes will be ignored when it is exchanged for a high-resolution image during output.
Image settings make up only one type of Ground Control in FlightCheck. The other profile types are File, Pages, Page Setup, Print, Colors, Trapping, Fonts, Pages, Supporting and Images. There are many sections and individual Ground Controls in each of these categories. Each Ground Controls can be made active or inactive. An active Ground Controls will produce a warning if the conditions it represents are found. As mentioned above, which Ground Controls are activated will depend on the type of document and output environment being utilized.
If you will be sending your documents to a prepress or repro house or a print vendor for output, it is a good idea to discuss your FlightCheck Professional Ground Controls settings with that vendor. Vendors know which conditions produce errors during document output.
For more information on FlightCheck Professional, please see this demonstration via this educational video:
Tags: Adobe InDesign, colors, file formats, FlightCheck, FlightCheck Ground Controls, flightcheck training, Ground Controls, groundcontrols, images, layout, PDF, preflight, preflight basics, preflight profile, preflight settings, quality control, QuarkXPress