Preflight checking

The notion of checking equipment before starting a job is common to aviation, which is why the publishing industry has adopted the idea of "preflight checking" files before output, said Gary Cosimini, business development manager for Adobe Systems in New York.

Aviators look for visible signs of trouble, believing that it's better to find something wrong on the ground and fix it before trying to fly, Cosimini said. Similarly, production departments now are trying to avoid sending bad jobs to proofers and imagesetters, thus saving time and consumables.

But just as aircraft rely on vital parts that are not visible from the outside, ads and pages have ingredients that may prove faulty only when they hit a RIP or recorder. Complicating things are people -- users who push the envelope to try to get more done, and users who make mistakes, such as generating a color image in RGB instead of CYMK.

Nowadays, detecting such problems is part of the output process, which is not tolerant of the delays that the failure of a job to make it through will cause. And the usual solution is time-consuming as well: Disassemble the item in an attempt to find the afflicted element.

In the best of all worlds, Cosimini said, preflight checking would be superseded by in-flight checking, which would be followed immediately by in-flight repairs. But now, once an ad is committed to the output path, there's no turning back -- and so, Cosimini recommended, the preflight process needs to be moved far upstream, to the ad creator's workstation, where a preflight check would detect problems where they can be fixed most easily.

Compounding the issue is the nature of desktop publishing -- open systems, multiple platforms, several operating systems, many apps to perform similar tasks, countless fonts and "renegade EPS clip art."

Because of the volume of ads most newspapers handle, and the variety of sources, efficiency is key -- and standardization is a goal earnestly to be sought. Current preflight software includes FlightCheck, made by Markzware Software of Santa Ana, Calif., and PreFlight Pro, from Extensis Corp. of Portland, Ore.

Cosimini faulted both for yielding reports that were "involved and complex."

"These reports are telling you more than you need to know, when what you want is just a thumbs up or thumbs down," he said.

Adobe's Acrobat program for making PDF files offers one solution to many output problems, Cosimini suggested, because it does not require access to fonts and tolerates cross platforms well. In-flight checking of Acrobat files will be coming with the next version of Markzware and PitStop by EnFocus.

Cosimini offered two cautions about preflight checking.

One, it should be done as part of the creation of a document. In the case of ads, it should be done by the advertiser, not the newspaper, because repair decisions need to be made by the originator, not the processor.

And two, preflight checks require a level of expertise that must be acquired and maintained. "Current preflight checkers don't check everything," the Adobe executive said. "They need experts to use them, not just users."

A production of The Cole Group, Copyright (c) 1997, All Rights Reserved.

Last updated: 28 June 1997.

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