Markzware develops FlightCheck, preflight technology to check documents in many file formats for print quality control. Markzware noticed this interesting article titled, “How Urgent is Preflighting in your workflow?” It has some excellent points about preflighting:

“In mixed publishing environments, preflighting traditionally belongs to the printing part of the workflow. But with on-demand printing services, web-based printable content may make preflighting more relevant than ever… preflighting documents seems like an absolute necessity. Preflighting is done to prepare a document for printing…

Preflighting a document involves checking it for errors in the output to print or screen. Applications such as InDesign CS3 feature preflighting functionality, but stop at showing you whether fonts are missing, or whether all colours are in the correct colour space. That functionality may be enough if you intend to publish your layout design and content to the web only, but it is far from elaborate enough for printed output.

Markzware has been developing FlightCheck for years, in several formats—including a highly efficient and successful online service—to accommodate for printed output, checking for trapping errors and compliance with standards such as PDF/X, for example. FlightCheck can be deployed early in the publishing process, which theoretically saves money as errors are discovered earlier and can be corrected before they cause trouble at the printing press.” Source

Here, they hit it right on the spot. FlightCheck is the standard preflight solution. Then comes a part which regards a misconception that early preflighting does not save money:

“However, the ROI of preflight tools that come in early in the process aren’t as clear cut as common logic would have it. Companies like Enfocus (now part of EskoArtwork) don’t even bother to preflight early in the publishing process… preflighting early in the process doesn’t save that huge amounts of money as common logic would dictate. One company of early preflight technology doesn’t agree. For years now, Markzware tries to convince the world that early preflighting does save a lot of money.
The truth is that it depends on your workflow…” Source

Early preflighting can save a lot of money. Book publishers have some of the most complex and often extended workflows there are. They have people delivering jobs in various document formats and types. Often each chapter is done by a different author in many cases a book may be comprised of  Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Microsoft Word, Publisher and PDF files. FlightCheck handles these file types and many more. Images may end-up being adapted in-house or out-sourced. The same with electronic illustrations and other artwork. Then we come to the PDF creation stage, way far away from all of the action which just took place. This generally happens in the Production Department, which got the job from Layout, which got the text from Editorial and the artwork and images from Design or outside sources.

If you leave preflight until PDF creation at the end and then postflight it, you take a great chance of major delays. What happens when the artwork on page 13 is not correct? They have to, in many cases by company policy, contact the Design Department to re-do it or make the necessary changes. (This depends on what the problem is.) FlightCheck would save so many delays.

Thus, you can see the need for preflight at many stages within a book publishing workflow, for example. Naturally, every print workflow is different, thus, advice can only be generalized. However, as Dr. Demming once said, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” So please, be sure to preflight early with FlightCheck to avoid printing problems and ensure that documents print properly.

You can buy Markzware’s pre press software via the FlightCheck page. See more printing solutions on the Markzware Products page.

The Importance of Preflighting Early and the Return on Investment