The Importance of Preflighting Early and the Return on Investment

Markzware, the developers of FlightCheck preflight technology to check documents in many file formats for print quality control, noticed this interesting article titled, “When do you need to preflight; the ROI discussion” which has some excellent points about preflighting:

“The need for preflighting depends on the workflow and the job type. Magazine publishers will want to preflight early in the publishing process because they have no idea where the layout files they receive (adverts, classifieds, etc., for example) come from, and what the skill level of the layout designer of the file was.

For them and for newspaper publishers, preflighting must be done well before the file is converted to PDF. That indeed saves them huge amounts of money trying to correct the file downstream. Here, applications like Markzware FlightCheck are essential.” Source

Here, they hit it right on the spot. FlightCheck is the standard preflight solution. Then comes a part, with which I disagree, regarding a misconception that book publishers may not need early preflighting:

“Book publishers generally don’t need early preflighting either, although on-demand book publishers may require their book authors to check the documents they deliver – when they have been readily designed by an external designer hired by the author – for errors. That way they can avoid the most common errors. Preflighting with the built-in tools of InDesign or QuarkXPress only, probably won’t cut it. But with book publishers where the layout design is controlled in-house, the needs change. Source

This is simply not the case. Book publishers have some the most complex and often extended workflows there are. They have people delivering jobs in various document formats and types. Often each chapter is done by a different author in many cases a book may be comprised of  Adobe InDesign, QuarkXpress, Microsoft Word, Publisher and PDF files. FlightCheck handles these file types and many more. Images may end-up being adapted in-house or out-sourced. The same with electronic illustrations and other artwork. Then we come to the PDF creation stage, way far away from all of the action which just took place. This will generally happen in the Production Department, which just got the job from Layout, which got the text from Editorial and the artwork and images from Design, as well as sometimes outside sources.

If you leave preflight until PDF creation at the end and then postflighting it, you are taking a great chance of major delays. What happens when the artwork on page 13 is not correct? They have to, in many cases by company policy, contact the Design Department to re-do it or make the necessary changes (depending on what the problem is). FlightCheck would save so many delays.

Thus, you can see the need for preflight at many stages within a book publishing workflow. Naturally, every workflow is different, thus, advice can only be generalized. However, as Dr. Demming once said, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” So please, be sure to preflight early with FlightCheck preflight solution to avoid printing problems and ensure that documents print properly.

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