Eliminates Errors with Newspaper Layout – Preflighting with Markzware FlightCheck
Markzware, the publisher of FlightCheck, patented software for preflighting, saw the January issue of Newspaper & Technology, which covered the topic of ‘preflighting‘ and the role that it plays in The Catholic Spirit newspaper and its newspaper layout:
Special to Newspapers & Technology
Nearly two decades ago, the publishing industry was abuzz about a little thing called computer-to-plate. CTP meant that the bridge that connected the publisher to its printer would be completely digital, that content could remain in electronic form from the time it was created in a desktop publishing application right up until the plates were imaged for the press. With CTP, there would be no more need for film.
CTP revolutionized publishing; it became better, faster and, without question, cheaper to publish not only newspapers but any type of content. But with the advent of CTP came some challenges. With so many ways of creating content, with different applications like QuarkXPress, the Microsoft suite of applications, Adobe’s Pagemaker, and more recently, Adobe InDesign, there needed to be some industry-wide agreement on the best way to create content for print publications.
Along came PDF, the portable document format, a digital file format that could be easily opened and manipulated with a free reader, and a modest little tool known as Acrobat. It was a small file format, and the print and publishing industry developed a certain fondness for it. It became the de facto standard for content, with most printers requesting that their clients submit print jobs in the format.
Unfulfilled promise
Although PDF promised to be a file format that would address some of the inconsistencies in content creation, it failed in another aspect: It hasn’t been able to address all the prepress conditions necessary to enable a truly automated, hands-off workflow between publisher and printer.
Many printers these days – in the newspaper and publication space, as well as in the commercial print market – can attest that there’s a lot of content coming through the doors that’s been ill-prepared and far from ready to go to press.
Even simple, innocent mistakes during content preparation – forgetting to embed fonts, placing a graphic that’s too low-resolution for decent output, and so on – can wreak havoc at prepress, bringing the workflow to halt until the problems are resolved. And creating a PDF to send to a printer will not solve that problem. As with any digital file, the old adage rings true: Garbage in, garbage out.
Team spirit
To avoid printing pitfalls, weekly paper The Catholic Spirit deployed FlightCheck Professional from Markzware to avoid file errors, said John Wolszon, network administrator and production supervisor.
“We probably design five to 10 percent of the ads that run in the issue,” he said. “The majority of the files nowadays come in PDF format, but we occasionally receive native files, mostly Quark and an occasional InDesign file, and occasionally, Illustrator files.”
Wolszon said he preflights incoming PDF files and finished pages before he makes PDF files for printer American Color. “I used to regularly get phone calls in the middle of the night from printers, telling me about missed RGB artwork, photos scaled in Quark, resolution problems, missing art, etcetera. Since I’ve been [preflighting], I haven’t received one phone call about production problems.”
It may seem redundant to check digital files at two places in the production workflow – after the native application file is created, which in The Catholic Spirit’s case is in done in QuarkXPress, and again after the final PDF is created – but Wolszon said the few extra minutes to perform the preflight saves the newspaper money.
“When I check my files, I know that everything is ready for printing and that there are no surprises in the file,” Wolszon said. “We also don’t get billed for alterations. [It] saves time and money, and you don’t miss deadlines because of errors in the file. You know that what you send to the printer is what you’ll receive.”
Gretchen A. Peck is a freelance writer who covers the international printing and publishing industries. Source
FlightCheck preflight software can help you eliminate errors with newspaper layout during preflighting before printing. FlightCheck checks documents for print quality assurance and provides a detailed preflight report, so you can avoid printing problems before they happen. FlightCheck preflight software is available online at the FlightCheck Store.
