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
This is a great, often overlooked, feature of FlightCheck Professional v6- the ability to open or preflight two (or more) documents at a time. This allows you to very effectively compare the two and see the differences, if any. We have heard from users doing this and thought it wise to share with you in the form of a video… plus, a few other general preflight tips; showing how you *could* check each image in Adobe Photoshop seperately or just use FlightCheck to get the job done for you within seconds:
Sometimes you have to scream to get people’s attention. This is especially true of preparing documents for print and direct mail. The most reliable format for reaching potential audiences is still the printed word, and the ability to create eye-catching and immediate response fliers and newsletters has been greatly enhanced by digital technologies. It also involves checking the integrity of the digital file before final print or manufacture — a practice otherwise known as ‘preflighting.’
Acrobats Preflight tools are powerful and complex. But you can simplify your preflight life by creating a standalone droplet. Then, any PDF you drop onto it will be tested against specific project requirements, and can then be automatically moved into a different folder and a report generated.
Adobe announced Acrobat Pro 9, the next version of its PDF viewing and editing application, along with Creative Suite 3.3 on Monday. Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 will include native Flash support, enhanced collaboration tools like PDF Portfolios, improved print production tools, and support for Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.
PDF Portfolios lets Acrobat users bundle documents, images and videos together as packages with summaries, create PDF forms and collect and analyze form data without requiring IT department involvement. Portfolios are compatible with the new (in beta) Acrobat.com hosted services that support document collaboration.
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.
We have heard of many creatives and designers starting to use FlightCheck to check their web banners before posting.
This video explains the quick and easy process of batch checking images files to ensure either web or print quality. Users of Photoshop or other image editing tools, should love this one!
Hello, my name is David Dilling from Markzware, thanks for joining us today. We are going to go over FlightCheck Professional, Markzware advanced preflight tool in comparison to Adobe built-in preflight within InDesign CS3 and CS2 I believe.
Over the years, we have seen more and more seemingly thinking that they are getting full-fledged preflight if they use Adobe InDesign built-in prefight tool within InDesign. Well, I am here to tell you that simply is not true.
