Learn How To Start Preflighting
Pre-Press Print Files With This Markzware
FlightCheck Quick Start Guide!

Preflighting Pre-press Print Files

As you begin your experience in your preflight journey, Markzware is happy to offer this preflighting start-up guide. Preflighting involves several stages, including previewing, inspecting, then analyzing your digital job files, to identify and correct potential problems before the files are output, with the intention of catching potential problems, as early as possible

Printers borrowed the term “preflight” from the procedure pilots use before taking off. The plane analogy is appropriate, because civil air flights are what inspired the term pre-flighting, in the first place. Pilots have a checklist to go over, to make sure that their plane is ready to fly.

Similarly, printers have adopted a checklist to review, before sending a file to the printer. Just as in air travel, proper preflighting can make all the difference in ensuring a smooth, successful outcome for your project. Proper preflight procedures not only reduce your prepress costs, but also make sure your job is accurately output, within your turnaround time.

FlightCheck® is a program that implements this process electronically. This standalone application for the macOS can preflight, preview, report on, and package documents of many file types into a job folder. These file types include Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, PDF (such as Canva, Word, and CorelDraw), and Adobe Illustrator files, without having to have these applications loaded on your computer.

Ground Controls

The heartbeat of FlightCheck is the “Ground Controls” settings. These are checks for specific traits or conditions that may exist within a document. There are presets that can help to get you started very quickly. FlightCheck offers Ground Controls, which you can toggle on or off, for your various workflows.

In FlightCheck Ground Controls, there are a series of toggle switches that are in one of three states:
1. Ignore – This tells FlightCheck you are not interested in this trait.
2. Warning – You’ll find this important, but it is not a show stopper and your job can still be processed OK.
3. Error – You’ll find this very important and it needs to be fixed now, before the job moves any further down the workflow.

For more information, click here.

How To Start The Preflight Process With FlightCheck

The preflight process with FlightCheck starts with simply dragging and dropping your files onto the FlightCheck interface. You will immediately notice that an innovative feature offered in FlightCheck is the Document Preview of the file(s). This is done without the need for any native or host applications. There are two main modes: The Inventory Mode and Preflight Mode.