DesktopMedia would like to thank Markzware, the leading software developer in preflight and file utilities for creative workflows for their generous donation of FlightCheck Professional, FlightCheck Designer and Q2ID to the DesktopMedia training lab. Not only will we put this to good use exposing and teaching as many professionals as possible, but, in the coming months we’ll be writing about how this powerful tool can help your organization!
Preflight and Conversion Tools For Document Content - MARKZWARE
Check out Markzware for all their latest offerings. Remember, the earlier in the your workflow you can include quality control the greater the success rate of your production files! Flightcheck Professional can review more file formats than you think — InDesign CS3, Quark 7, PDFs, even Microsoft Office files!!!
Content abounds at small to large organizations alike. The challenge for St. Louis businesses is to reproduce information in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.
Never before has the world of graphic arts been so dynamic, so ripe with change and new opportunities afforded by emerging creative technologies. And no longer are the creations made in popular desktop programs — like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word — bound to the traditional constraints of print. These days, businesses create content for any number of purposes.
The success of print projects today largely depends upon two things: the efficiency of the workflow and the quality of the content. Depending on where in the print manufacturing workflow you reside, you may receive digital content for any number of sources — some, more experienced in creating digital files for print than others.
Desktop publishing and computer-to-plate printing provided the foundation of the digital workflow for print as we know it today. More than a decade ago, the commercial printing industry began to envision that workflow. It was stealthy, automated and efficient — with client-supplied digital content files moving seamlessly through the print company’s processes. That was what we envisioned, at least.
Never before has the world of graphic arts been so dynamic, so ripe with change and new opportunities afforded by emerging creative technologies. And no longer are the creations made in popular desktop programs - like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word - bound to the traditional constraints of print. These days, businesses create content for any number of purposes.
Hour one: Markzware. This software publishing company, caters to the worldwide graphic, printing and publishing industries. FlightCheck Professional is a stand-alone application that can inspect over 45 layout application types and hundreds of image types. The amazing thing is that you do not even need to purchase Acrobat to perform quality control checks on PDF files!
Inspired by the “Animator vs Animation” Flash animated film by Alan Becker (click here to see that one), David Nieuwenhuizen, the Markzware Europe design-intern and student at Grafische Lyceum Rotterdam or GLR for short, created this cool piece. What we like about it is that it is not only showing animation and flash in a fun way, but also giving you a tour of FlightCheck Professional, highlighting some of the more important features and interface items. The FlightCheck eagle has his talons full with this pesky image, the Stickman;
More and more printers and publishers are reverting from demanding print-ready PDF jobs only. PDF and the various standards out there like PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF and the great work by the GWG (Ghent PDF Workgroup) are excellent initiatives, but not the cure-all. The reasons for this have to do with preflighting and last minute file corrections. Editing a PDF is not a trivial task. Yes, a prepress expert well trained with tools like Enfocus PitStop or Callas PDFToolbox can get away with some, but not all changes. (We will cover this in a future blog post.)
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.
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.
