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

Preflight, in the graphic arts sense, is the process of checking a digital document before it goes to plate, print or otherwise output (exported - such as to PDF). It traditionally is a way to check quality before going to the printing press, digital or otherwise, but can also be used to check online banners and gifs. Preflight is best done on the source document, such as those created in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress or Corel!Draw as some examples, before becoming a PDF (Portable Document Format). Similar to a pilot whom walks around and performs a pre take-off pre-flight check, preflighting for designers and prepress operators should be a must.

by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.