The Ideal Preflight Workflow
The ideal preflighting workflow is a goal toward which many prepress professionals strive. Markzware is the inventor of FlightCheck, the patented preflight technology to check documents in many file formats to ensure proper printing. FlightCheck thoroughly scans documents in Adobe InDesign, Acrobat PDF, Illustrator and more to flag potential printing problems before you print.
If I am going to preflight, how do I do it? What criteria will I use, and where in the workflow should preflight occur? The answer: At every stage of the workflow. Native files should be verified before a document is converted to PDF. FlightCheck can preflight native files. That file should subsequently be verified before it is sent to the supplier, and the supplier may want to verify it yet again before the file is imposed and plates are set.
You’ve typically got a content creator; you’ve got either a publisher or prepress house, and you’ve eventually got a printer in the printing workflow. Potentially, at least three people handle the document. FlightCheck is the ideal preflighting solution, since it can be used by several people. Preflighting should be done immediately when the file is created and at every stage in the workflow when the document is modified.
Why should we build a workflow? To streamline the workflow, to reduce the turnaround time, eliminate problems, and, to avoid missed deadlines. Most problems occur when a document is handed off from one party to another. When done properly, preflighting can save time, save money and stop workflow headaches.
Ideal Preflighting
Typically, where preflighting happens today is at the printer, and what you find is that you’re ready to take a job to press and then discover you have missing fonts, low-res images, RGB, etc. FlightCheck can flag these and many other potential printing problems. Otherwise, the document has to be rejected and sent back. Time is lost, we all start all over, and potentially miss our deadlines.
In the prepress fairytale world, we would preflight files before they are submitted to their destination. So, if it’s an advertiser and a publisher, we want to preflight the ad file while it’s still on that advertiser’s desk, before he goes and burns it to a CD or e-mails it to the publisher. If you are a printer, you’d like to know that every job you receive from a customer has been checked before you get it, and that comes with a nice little preflight report, which FlightCheck provides, that hopefully says that everything looks good.
Giving your customers a new perspective
No one really likes change, so it seems likely that there will be some push-back from print buyers who may not immediately accept taking on preflighting responsibilities. So, it’s up to the printers to sell the preflight workflow as a win-win for themselves and their clients.
Graphic artists don’t like the idea of preflighting, generally. They look at the screen and say “Yuck.” They just want to create beautiful things on screen, so there’s this prevailing mentality of “It’s my job to make things look good on screen, and it is your job to print them.”
There are other benefits to preflighting besides simply catching file errors earlier in the workflow. Implementing preflighting at various stages of the print workflow will help flush out conflicts regarding accountability. Who is responsible for making sure the documents are built correctly? What it comes down to is, what is the state of the file when you sent it? FlightCheck makes preflighting easy, so this becomes less of an issue.
The dynamics of accountability have changed. No longer can content creators rest on the assurance that their printers will take responsibilities for print errors if they don’t catch files they’ve submitted. Sometimes printers were eager to accept just a few years ago when they were just happy to get any digital files at all.
If a publisher submits a problematic file to the printer, accountability falls back on the publisher’s shoulders. To change the customer’s perspective of preflighting, printers may want to scream this message from the mountaintops: Send us bad files, and you’re running a risk.
Education
Who wants to keep fixing the same problems over and over again? No one. So how do you teach your clients how to make bullet-proof, error free documents? There are a lot of well meaning printers out there that do go out and buy preflight software (like FlightCheck, the preflight solution from Markzware) for their customers. However, that doesn’t always solve the problem when the customers don’t really know how to use it, or they don’t know how to configure the specifications properly.
What is needed is free training for customers because they just can’t send bad files anymore. Teach these customers to start learning how to fix files and prepare them correctly from the beginning. The free FlightCheck demo and FlightCheck videos may provide a great headstart.
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