Jon Warner from Trade Press Media Group talks to us at Print 09 in this video on how he uses FlightCheck Professional AND Adobe Acrobat PDF to preflight file formats and preflight fonts in his incoming graphics files during prepress in the print workflow. He uses both and prefers FlightCheck (for everything first) due to its ease-of-use and ability to preflight file formats of over 50 file types, such as InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Acrobat PDF and others. It is much more effective to preflight fonts before outputting to Acrobat PDF:
In the last segment, you see Doug Rosen, Markzware‘s project manager, going into some advanced details with Jon on font search paths to optimize the process by preflighting and to package fonts during the graphics workflow. Markzware FlightCheck can preflight file formats of several types, including Acrobat PDF, InDesign CS4, Quark 8, and more.
It was so great to hear Jon’s comments about the graphic arts, or what is called “print media”, industry. He says some out there think it is best to funnel this multi-step preflight process to the very end of the workflow and some are even trying to automate preflight checking.
Preflighting is largely a human process that requires a simple preflight checklist to work best. It should be done for graphic design files at every step in the print workflow, where the page layout file switches hands or is due for document output. (See Markzware’s preflight articles). As Dr. Deming said on quality assurance, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility.”
Preflight with FlightCheck and Acrobat PDF in the Graphics Workflow
