The Ideal Preflight Workflow
If I am going to preflight, how do I do it? What criteria will I use, and where in the workflow should preflight occur? The answer: At every stage of the workflow. Native files should be verified before a document is converted to PDF. That file should subsequently be verified before it is sent to the supplier, and the supplier may want to verify it yet again before the file is imposed and plates are set.
You’ve typically got a content creator; you’ve got either a publisher or prepress house, and you’ve got a printer, eventually, in the workflow. Potentially, you’ve got at least three people that are handling the file. Preflighting should be done immediately when the file is created and at every stage in the workflow when the file is modified.
Why do we want to build a workflow? To streamline the workflow, to reduce the turnaround time, eliminate problems, and, to avoid missed deadlines. Most problems occur when a file is handed off from one party to another. The benefits to do preflighting is that when done right, it can save time, save money and stop workflow headaches.
The ideal preflighting
At the printer is typically where preflighting happens today, and what you find is that you’re ready to take a job to press and you discover you have missing fonts, low-res images, RGB, whatever. The file has to be rejected and sent back. Time is lost, we all start all over, and potentially miss our deadlines.
In the prepress fairy tell world we want to get these files preflighted before they get submitted to their destination. So, if it’s an advertiser and a publisher, what do we want to happen? We want the ad file preflighted while it’s still on that advertiser’s desk, before he goes and burns it to a CD or e-mails it to the publisher.
If you are a printer, you want to know that every job you receive from a customer has been checked before you get it, and that it comes with a nice little report that says that everything looks good.
Giving your customers a new perspective
No one really likes change, so it seems likely that there will be some push-back from print buyers who may not immediately want to take on preflighting responsibilities. So, it’s up to the printers to sell the idea as a win-win for themselves and their clients.
Graphic artists don’t like the idea of preflighting, generally. They look at the screen and go yuck. They just want to create beautiful things on screen, so there’s this prevailing mentality, which is: It’s my job to make things look good on screen, and it is your job to print them.
There are other benefits to preflighting besides simply catching errors earlier in the print workflow. Implementing preflighting at various stages of the workflow will help flush out conflicts regarding accountability. Who is responsible for making sure the documents are built correctly? What it comes down to is, what is the state of the file when you sent it?
The dynamics of accountability have changed. No longer can content creators rest on the assurance that their printers will take responsibilities for errors if they don’t catch files they’ve submitted. Sometimes printers were eager to accept just a few years ago when they were just happy to get any digital files at all.
If a publisher submits a problematic file to the printer, accountability falls back on the publisher’s shoulders. To change the customer’s perspective of preflighting, printers may want to scream this message from the mountaintops: Send us bad files, and you’re running a risk.
Education
Who wants to keep fixing the same problems over and over again. No one. So how do you teach your clients how to make files that are bullet proof? There are a lot of well meaning printers out there that have gone out and bought preflighting software for their customers. However, that doesn’t solve the problem, because the customers don’t really know how to use it, or they don’t know how to configure the specifications properly.
What is needed it free training for customers because they just can’t send bad files anymore. Teach these customers on how to start learning how to fix files and prepare them correctly from the beginning.
Tags: FlightCheck, Ideal Preflight Workflow, Markzware, preflight, prepress, Workflow