Live Preflighting announced in the coming Adobe CS4
Adobe Creative Suite 4 or CS4 has been officially announced. It appears to be an Upgrade largely focused on web and multi-media designers, yet delves into some production stream-lining as well. In this print-production area, InDesign CS4 itself does appear to have some interesting things for layout artists and preflight operators alike. Chiefly what they are now calling ‘Live Preflighting‘:
“Preflight while you design. Continuous preflighting alerts you to potential production problems in real time so you can quickly navigate to a problem, fix it directly in layout, and keep working.” SOURCE: http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/features/?view=topnew
CS4 in-app-preflight options sound interesting and potentially very useful, however FlightCheck Professional from Markzware will prelflight more than 50 file formats, including most of Adobe’s Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat PDF, etc) line as well as QuarkXpress, and numerous other image and layout types, all as a stand alone process, making it very easy to use. Preflighting “within” the layout is different than preflighting what comes in to your shop (or goes out)… One rather interesting feature of FlightCheck v6 to mention at this point, for instance, is it’s batch preflight mode:
Adobe CS4 Live Preflighting will likely be exciting for those solely and actively working within InDesign, however do not forget FlightCheck as your stand-alone preflight application to make comprehensive in-coming preflight checks, easy to share and understand quality assurance reports and numerous ways to go to the problems (When in the future CS4 preflight could potentially further assist once in InDesign.) and lastly FlightCheck can collect or package jobs for archiving, emailing or uploading.
As a printer, copy-shop, publishers or design agency getting in jobs from others, FlightCheck is virtually a must-have. Here is a quote to end with for now from a Sir Speedy printing and copy center owner:
“We see all sorts of files come over the counter here. A lot of customers think that just because they’ve created a file that looks good on the screen that it’s going to print the same way. But unless the creator knows what they’re doing, there may be missing elements or other problems like low-res images.
To complicate our job, many of our clients don’t even supply a proof, so if a font defaults, for example, we may not be able to tell that it’s happened. Preflighting allows us to have three options when there’s a problem with a file. First, if its a small problem, we can just make the quick fix. Or we can call the customer and tell them what’s missing and provide them with a preflight report. They can then either fix it themselves and resubmit the corrected file, or for $70 an hour, we’ll correct it for them. The bottom line is money.”
MARY LOU BENZEL, Owner, SIR SPEEDY CLAIREMONT MESA
SOURCE: http://www.markzware.com/flightcheck_professional/testimonials.php
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