Preflight: The Who's, What's, When's, Where's and Why's.

Let's face it, preflight is not a new concept in the industry. It's been around a long time in one form or another. Way back when Gutenberg was printing bibles someone had to examine the plate to make sure it was right. After all, how expensive and laborious was printing? Very... It was no different when Benjamin Franklin was printing. When there were mechanicals to shoot, someone always looked at them before they got to the camera. Before sending a galley of lead off someone always checked it. When someone photo typeset a page or a galley again someone looked at it before it was imaged. Up to this point, we've pretty much stayed in house when it comes to creating and imaging (in one form or another). With the advent of desktop publishing in the 80's courtesy of Aldus, Adobe and Linotype it was taken out of the hands of professionals and into the hands of the mass market. It may have started as a slow process but it has increased with every iteration of innovation in the industry at large. And with every iteration the level of skill required to create is diminished. And with that diminished level of skill comes art that has more "problems" of one sort or another. That was about the time when the industry started telling the creatives "Just give us the art and we'll take care of it." Wow... Did that ever set us up for untold problems. And now anyone with a computer, Windows, Mac OS or Linux can be a desktop publisher or graphic designer. Microsoft is the favorite punching bag for this having put layout features in to Microsoft Word which then morphed into Publisher. And since people used PowerPoint to make slides some people figured they could even have them printed offset to boot. Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft in all that they do. But I will say this; Don't blame Microsoft. It's not their fault. They just made desktop publishing available to more people. That's probably the last time you'll hear me say that. So I wanted to give a run down of what I think about this mess having done preflight for so many years. I may have excluded a few vendors, but that is purely accidental. I'm sitting here eating my soppa de pollo as I write this. It's very addicting, you should try it some time you're near an Azteca restaurant. But I digress...

The Who's

Who's out there in preflight land? Well let's start with my two favorites in no particular order. There's Enfocus and Markzware and then there is Callas. I don't mean to imply that the Callas tools are lackluster or ineffective. They are far from that. But here in the US lets face it, the market is owned by Markzware and Enfocus. These are the guys (and ladies) that really have the market world wide. Then you have the integrators or OEMs like Kodak, Art-Works, Heidelberg, Xitron, Global Graphics and others who use one or more of these products in their own products.

The What's

What were talking about is the Enfocus Library from Enfocus (who's owned by Art-Works) which is in PitStop Professional, PitStop Server, Instant PDF and PitStop Automate, Callas' pdfInspektor and Markzware's MarkzOne Engine. You can find the Enfocus Library in such products as Brisque (versions 2, 3 and 4), Prinergy (version 2), Harlequin RIPs, Xitron and others. If anyone has ever purchased a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 or 7 Professional you've got yourself a copy of pdfInspektor whether you know it or not. And Markzware has taken their preflighting to the desktop with FlightCheck Professional and Designer. Then they took it one step further and actually put it into Quark and InDesign with FlightCheck Studio.

The When's

In the 80's with desktop laser printers we were able to print out color separations from PageMaker, Quark, Freehand and Adobe Separator to check and see if everything was breaking correctly. Then we'd hope it came out the same way on the imagesetter when we sent it off to the service bureau or color house. At the service bureau I worked at we preflighted with LaserCheck by downloading this little bit of PostScript code to our laser printer which fooled the printer into behaving like an imagesetter as defined by the PPD we used. So we could print our job down to the spooler (PSserve from CopsTalk) and send it to the laser printer. If the lasers came out correctly we'd resubmit the job to the appropriate RIP for output. Now these weren't very often full size so we had to hope that when we looked at the film that all was right in the world before we proofed it. And that's where most of the errors were caught, at proofing. So you can see here how late in the process this was happening. We didn't really know what we were working with any degree of certainty. So when is the preflight supposed to happen you ask. It is supposed to happen everywhere. Which brings us to the where's.

The Where's

Where does preflight happen? That really depends on the workflow in general. With some workflows it happens before the art leaves the designer. Sometimes it happens at the printer when the art is received (not very I've learned), more often than not it happens at the RIP. And shockingly frequently it just doesn't happen at all. So there are a few savvy designers and other content creators that have taken the responsibility of preflight upon themselves to eliminate errors. They should be applauded because they are one of the most minute of minorities. Few printers (in the scheme of things) preflight art when it comes in with a job. And they should be applauded as well! They are consciously making an effort to eliminate the variables and the errors in the art before they start really spending money by putting ink on paper or otherwise using consumables and labor. And then there are those who just "take it and print it". I've found that those are often the digital printers where every they can get away with it by printing composite to the composite printers. Now that's not always the case, but it is a reality.

The Why's

Why does preflight happen, why doesn't it happen.