FlightCheck 6.12 (since upgraded), preflight solution by Markzware, was reviewed by Michael Shaw of MaUsE:
More wonderful news from Markzware for those of us who use InDesign or QuarkXPress. Markzware’s best preflighting software, FlightCheck Professional 6, has just received a really big upgrade to version 6.12. For those of you who don’t know, preflighting is an important behind-the-scenes step in any publishing workflow. Preflight preparation and testing involves the checking and verification of all aspects of a print job before it gets sent to the printers. This is done to ensure that the progression of steps necessary to complete the job can be carried out by the printer without expensive disruptions. Documents that are poorly prepared, with missing page elements, can create the most problems and cause added expense in terms of accurate output.
I’m the only Editor of this publication and I’m careful to create every MaUsE DoubleClick with images that I don’t move, rename or modify after insertion, and fonts that I personally verify. I use very few fonts, just two, and I make sure that I don’t use versions of the font (bold, condensed, italic, etc.) that I don’t have installed on this computer. But with much larger publications where many more people have input and control of a publication it can become a problem making sure that all of the resources required to print a document on paper are all consistent and all available to the printer. Anomalies can cause problems so I try to keep my image resolution and types consistant and make sure that none of my picture or text boxes run off the page.
The fact that your document looks good on your monitor does not guarantee that it will come back from the printer looking just as good. And in the printing industry there are no free throws. If you pay your print service to have something printed and it comes back to you totally unusable with glaring errors or missing images because of your carelessness, you still have to pay full price for it.
FlightCheck Professional 6 is the pre-press application of choice used to manage quality control for pre-printing. It will help you check your documents to make sure that everything your printer service needs will be available when required. One of the key capabilities of FlightCheck is its power to preflight a wide variety of file formats and image types.
FlightCheck analyzes documents thoroughly and warns you about potential printing problems while guiding you directly to the problem for repair. It issues a complete analysis of the document highlighting potential errors, item by item, including wrong document size, missing fonts, incorrect colors, transparency of spot colors, incorrect image resolution and much more.
FlightCheck then collects all required elements of the print job, such as images and fonts, to insure that jobs print as expected. After verification of the print job, FlightCheck Professional generates a detailed preflight report highlighting specific print problems and providing an easy means to navigate to them for repair. You can share these reports with customers, helping to communicate your needs and educate them to create better print-ready documents. Preflighting is a crucial step in achieving a successful print job. It’s how to keep small problems from becoming big, expensive problems.
Adobe InDesign’s basic built-in preflighting tools and QuarkXPress Job Jackets features offer some protection against native file problems. For basic and small publishing jobs like the DoubleClick that never see a professional printer these built-in features should suffice but for large expensive commercial publishing projects, where even your smallest mistakes can be costly, you need the insurance of a professional checker. Markzware FlightCheck Professional 6 is the best preflighting solution around.
On the next page you will see the FlightCheck 6.12 application in action generating a report during a routine check of a recent MaUsE DoubleClick issue I created with QuarkXPress. It is important to remember that FlightCheck Pro 6.12 works with Windows and Macintosh computers, and will preflight documents created with ALL of the major creative software titles, including desktop publishing, photo editing, and illustrating software. A partial list includes QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Acrobat PDF…And it handles many more… Source
How to Print. FlightCheck v6.12 Review by Michael Shaw of MaUsE.
