Welcome To FlightCheck®

Welcome to FlightCheck®

The term flightcheck is used to describe the process of checking a document prior to output, with the intention of catching potential problems as early as possible. FlightCheck® is a program that implements this process electronically.

All elements of your document must be examined in order to prevent unwanted issues during output. Failing to properly and thoroughly flightcheck your document could necessitate having to return to the document’s native application in order to make corrections and to then re-output the document all over again. For some large jobs going to print this could add up to a tremendous amount of wasted printing materials, lost time and consequently additional unplanned expenses.

To fully understand the action of performing a proper flightcheck you need only consider the comparison of what it takes to get an airplane ready for takeoff. The service engineers walk around the plane, clipboards in hand, inspecting each part for its proper working condition and when each item on their checklists have been checked off, then and only then can the plane be officially approved as being “ready to fly”.

Checking out an airplane, of course, can be a far more serious activity than the printing of a document because people’s lives will be at stake if something goes wrong with the plane. On the other hand, there will no doubt come a day when you will be asked to print an extremely important document where your job may certainly be at risk if you don’t get it right. But, relax and don’t worry! Such an event will never occur, now that you have FlightCheck to come to the rescue and help save the day!

Life Before FlightCheck®

Before FlightCheck, the most common way to check a document was known as the “print & pray” approach. This is where you would print the document, cheerfully skip over to your printer, pick up the paper, then abruptly burst into tears after spotting something wrong. You would then have to go back into the document, make the corrections and try printing again, this time with fingers crossed.

As users started getting wiser, the “eyeball method” next became the checking process of choice. This is where you would bring up your document on the screen and run down some sort of checklist until you happened to notice a potential problem. Although experienced checkers would know more about what to look for, even they would be forced to “hunt” for possible problems by closely examining each element of the document, page by page, box by box, character by character. This process tended to be very time consuming, and there was no guarantee of a complete and thorough job every time. If just one single problem was missed, the document would need to be reprinted.

Today we now have FlightCheck which scans documents electronically with high precision and speed and digs into the intricate details of individual elements and reports to you its findings. In many cases, FlightCheck uncovers potential output problems that the human eye could not possibly ever catch.

When FlightCheck issues its final approval, the document can then be confidently sent along to be printed. But, the real advantage to using FlightCheck becomes clearly evident when you consider what might happen if you blindly and bravely attempt to print your document without even bothering to first check it.

Therefore, before you go to press, you should always remind yourself of this very important motto: “What you check is what you get!”