InDesign CS4 Live Preflighting

As the inventors of preflight, holding US Patent # 5,963,641, Markzware has been busy innovating within this fast-moving technical niche since 1995. Markzware develops FlightCheck, the preflight solution to check many file types for quality assurance prior to printing. FlightCheck has become synonymous with preflight and many have referred to Markzware as ‘the preflight experts.’ So, it was interesting to read about the ‘few issues’ Mr. James Warmser discovered within Adobe InDesign’s Live Preflight:

“Up until CS4, InDesign’s preflight feature was subpar at best. Luckily preflight in CS4 has been completely redesigned from the ground up. My friend James Wamser (he printed the InDesign Secrets posters) and I were talking and although we both agree this is a great feature, he shared a few issues that he has discovered with the new preflight. The first few are the observations that he has come across and I added a few of my own.“ Source

You can read the article to see the details, but here is a general list of issues or things that this Adobe feature appears to lack:

• Four Color Text
• Bleed/trim hazard
• Profile Error reporting
• Preflight profile sharing with Acrobat
• Fonts not allowed rule
• Custom profile for everyone to download
• Slow performance
• Non-Proportional Scaling

FlightCheck can mean a lot for many of the above issues. For instance, the “Preflight profile sharing with Acrobat” point above is easily solved by using FlightCheck. Our Ground Control sets (which also take care of “Custom profile for everyone to download” above) can be set-up, shared with others and can check several file formats! This includes Adobe InDesign, Acrobat PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop, QuarkXPress and many other file types. See the usefulness?  You can use FlightCheck if you are doing Acrobat 8 print, Adobe file printing, etc.

Michael Ninness from Adobe makes a nice comment on this article linked above and he makes sense. This is a useful feature from Adobe and surely will get better, yet it must be clear that FlightCheck is a stand-alone application that is extremely fast (the coming version is like lightning) and useful in the workflow alongside Live in-flight checking, yet is a necessity.

A preflight check MUST take place before printing to catch printing errors before it’s too late. Markzware FlightCheck preflight solution thoroughly checks documents for quality assurance and even provides detailed reports on potential printing problems to avoid reprinting. Try the free FlightCheck demo and see how much time, money and materials you can save, while printing documents properly.

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