“What You Check Is What You Get”

“What you check is what you get!” by Ron Crandall, Chief Engineer of Markzware

You wouldn’t purchase fire insurance AFTER your house burns down, now would you? The same logical and preventative reasoning applies most applicable to today’s modern, fast-paced and booming printing industry. Being on the verge of going completely digital, bravely printing from computer to plate with no chance for even the slightest error, it becomes vitally important to ensure the topmost quality control in order to prevent reprints, and needless to say wasted time and money.

The latest buzz word in today’s printing world is “preflight”. This term originated from the NASA space program and it means to thoroughly inspect a spacecraft before launching. In fact, you might be able to recall a time when you sat on an airplane waiting for it to roll away from the dock and begin the taxi on out to the runaway, and you just sat there and sat there, whispering curse words to yourself because, after all, your time is valuable and how dare the airlines keep you waiting? But did you ever stop to think that those engineers in white coats, clipboards in hand, who were walking around the plane inspecting each and every part, were actually performing all the necessary “preflight” items on the checklist to ensure the plane was fully safe and completely ready to fly? Yes, lives are at stake and so a proper preflight check is indeed absolutely required. Of course, there is no valid comparison between this and one of your simple print jobs, unless you consider losing a valuable customer to be an important thing to prevent, or for that matter, perhaps your own job is at risk should you botch a print job and have to rerun it all over again, but the most embarrassing moment of all is realizing afterwards how you could have caught the problem ahead of time, that is if you would have donned a preflighter’s cap, picked up that clipboard and inspected that job before blindly printing it.

Why spend all your time “putting out fires” when you can easily prevent even the smallest sparks from ever brewing? This is why it can be said “what you check is what you get!” for invariably if you fail to carefully and thoroughly preflight a job, if you swear you just don’t have time for such an “added step”, then you will end up getting what you pay for. Cutting corners will only yield a cut in business, a cut in profit, and so is it worth it to skimp, to let things pass by without inspection? Or would you rather lean towards the unmistakable truth that you will get exactly what you check, meaning if you take the time to perform all the proper quality assurance controls you will inevitably experience increased workflow. More jobs get finished, printed correctly the first time, which can naturally result in expansion, in other words more business, and hence more revenue. Therefore, “preflight” is not just some nice thing other printers are doing, but an effective means of decreasing wasted time and increasing production. What, then, would it be worth to you if you were to own fire insurance BEFORE your house burns downs? “Better safe than sorry” the wise printers always say.

The Wise Merchant

Most instant and small commercial printers who need to be educated going to the world of digital understand that to keep ahead of the competition you need some sort of edge. The exact thing to fit the bill is to offer some sort of preflight checking, whether that be a paid service or steps in your workflow you throw in for free. In either case, it becomes a great advantage to be able to check a job ahead of time, catching any potential problems long before you actually do the final printing. But, what exactly are the steps to performing a preflight? Let’s take a moment to examine the history of preflight.

Several years ago, the most common way to preflight a document was known as the “trial and error” approach. This is where you print the document, cheerfully skip over to your printer, pick up the paper, then abruptly burst into tears after spotting something wrong. This meant you would then have to find and ?x the problems and try printing once again, this time with fingers crossed.

As we started getting wiser, the “eyeball method” next became the preflighting process of choice. This is where you would bring up your document and simply stare at the computer screen long enough until you happened to notice a potential problem. Even an experienced checker would still be forced to “hunt” for possible problems by closely examining each element of the document page-by-page, box-by-box, character-by-character, and while this tended to be very time consuming, there was also no guarantee one could do a complete and thorough job every time, especially when attempting to cover a very large document. If the preflight checker were to miss just one single problem, the document would unfortunately need to be reprinted all over again.

In today’s modern computerized world we now have several solutions where a document file can be examined electronically with high precision and speed. An example of software which performs the vital checking functions is an application developed by Markzware called “FLIGHTCHECK®” and is a “must-have” for every wise merchant’s arsenal. To be without such an aid would be like a fireman trying to battle a blazing fire without a hose or like digging a hole without a shovel, having no choice but to scrape the ground endlessly with your hands in hopes of whittling away the dirt. So, why be so foolish? Why not become armed to the teeth and obtain some sort of preflight software to assist in getting your jobs out the door and on time!

What is an ounce of prevention worth?

In order to become fully educated, you need to have a solid foundation to build upon. Understanding the basics is the most important part of learning. Now, if you stop and think about it, the absolutely sole reason why preflight exists at all in the first place is because today’s DTP applications offer features which users employ that only end up “breaking” the job! A designer often works in a room with closed doors, whistling away while designing objects with pretty colors, totally unaware of whether or not the output device can actually or effectively print the chosen colors. The designer may not have even consulted with the print operators to learn the output resolution or line screen (lines per inch) and therefore those “pretty images” might just print with poor or unacceptable quality. Or, the DTP application allows the designer to stylize text and images, but the output device, or the font resources, may not entirely support the custom stylization features. Therefore, the sole culprit, the “one to blame”, is in fact today’s DTP applications which has features that allow the designer to go hog wild and consequently put the burden on the poor preflighters who have to then figure out which of the features are acceptable and which are not.

When it comes down to the bottom line, the utmost best form of preflight is to create perfect documents in the first place. Okay, perhaps this is not possible, but at least you can get the idea that if documents were built correctly there wouldn’t be a need for preflighting! But, how exactly do you make a perfect document? Well, this comes about only through proper education. In an ideal situation, you would plan the design of the document taking into account the output resolution and line screen, scan the images and photos at a DPI of 1.5 to 2.0 times the line screen, choose a list of specific fonts (commonly called “corporate fonts”which are the only allowed fonts the designer should be using. No custom fonts from home, please!) and to decide well ahead of time which specific colors are being used, whether the job is a 4-color CMYK process job, or if a 5th Pantone plate will need to be printed, and so forth. If a “blueprint” for the document is well established, then the job can be built according to the exact specifications and consequently the preflighting steps can be abandoned altogether, or so it is hoped.

However, it’s easier said than done, especially when you are a quick printer and receive all kinds of poorly created documents from “off the street”. People walk in with who knows what sort of jobs, all created with varying applications, and so you need to be on your toes, or have your aspirin bottle fully stocked. This is the exact point where implementing a smart preflight program will reap large rewards.

The Preflight Checklist

It is important to create a preflight checklist which best suits your needs. Many jobs today are simple manuals, perhaps entirely black and white, with 72 DPI grayscale images of screen dumps, and therefore no need for very serious preflighting concerns. Some jobs are self-contained, such as a PDF file, where the fonts and images are already embedded. However, when you start receiving major DTP files such as QuarkXPress or Adobe Indesign, the need for proper preflighting rises. This can be best understood by realizing when you mount a Zip disk containing a job, all you really see on the computer screen are the little icons for the document and associated files. You really have no clue as to what’s inside those files, and this is where an electronic inspector, such as FLIGHTCHECK®, comes in to play. Today we can perform an exhaustive and detailed analysis of the contents of the files in order to catch any potential printing problem. Preflight software can instantly determine the version of the file (for example, you won’t be able to open a QuarkXPress 4.0 document if all you have is a QuarkXPress 3.3 application) which colors and fonts are being used, are all the fonts available, including those referenced by placed images. Are the printer font files also available (otherwise the output device may print using either the bitmap resources of the font or substitute with the dreaded Courier font). Are there any hairlines (lines drawn so thin that at high resolutions they will appear to be “broken”) and do all of the linked image files actually exist on the disk. Are these images the desired resolution, or have they been scaled within picture boxes to the point where the “effective resolutions” (DPI times the scale factor) is now out of range (as compared to the output line screen).

Therefore, your preflight checklist should essentially be comprised of any items you need to detect which might “break” the job. You can do this by trial and error. That is to say, whenever a job is halted you can tell yourself “I had better remember to look out for that situation in the future”. Or, you can implement a proper preflight station, complete with educated operators employing some sort of preflight software, in order to confidently catch the potential problems ahead of time, for indeed “what you check is what you get!”