Your workflow determines whether it pays off to preflight early in the workflow, i.e. as a designer or editor. If your layout files originate from a known source that you can control, preflighting in the final (PDF) stage may actually generate a higher ROI.
The need for preflighting depends on the workflow and the job type. Magazine publishers will want to preflight early in the publishing process because they have no idea where the layout files they receive (adverts, classifieds, etc., for example) come from, and what the skill level of the layout designer of the file was.
For them and for newspaper publishers, preflighting must be done well before the file is converted to PDF. That indeed saves them huge amounts of money trying to correct the file downstream. Here, applications like Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional are essential. Zevrix’s InPreflight is a good alternative although it misses the point conceptually.
InPreflight is a plug-in, and therefore more like Markzware’s FlightCheck Designer. For InPreflight to work, the operator still first has to open the file in InDesign or QuarkXPress, which costs additional time that can quickly add up when hundreds of files need to be checked. FlightCheck Professional does preflighting as a stand-alone application.
The source determines the preflight needs
In other environments, early-in-the-workflow preflighting may be less necessary than one would think. In a DTP production house that is affiliated to a printer, or when a printer has its own DTP production department, the files originate from a well-known source and therefore don’t really need early preflighting.
Book publishers generally don’t need early preflighting either, although on-demand book publishers may require their book authors to check the documents they deliver—when they have been readily designed by an external designer hired by the author—for errors. That way they can avoid the most common errors. Preflighting with the built-in tools of Indesign or QuarkXPress only, probably won’t cut it. But with book publishers where the layout design is controlled in-house, the needs change.
In fact, there’s even a reason not to early preflight in those cases. Even with the best preflighting application, some errors may slip through the mazes of the net if the layout file hasn’t been first output to the PDF that will serve as the print master. Therefore, creating a PDF master—a process which doesn’t cost a lot of time these days—is the most dependable and best way to ensure that a preflight check will find all errors.
When books, printed courses, or other publications need to be output in several versions (languages, for example), PDF output is best, because it keeps the production process—the workflow—as simple as possible. If the PDF doesn’t pass the preflighting in PitStop Professional, the operator can quickly make small corrections.
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Even large corrections are possible with Pitstop Professional, but again, these should be made in the original file. If you do create them with Pitstop Professional, it should be as a means of last resort—when you really can’t change the original. The reason: you risk ending up with so many different versions that the whole publishing project becomes complete chaos.
That’s also the reason why a product like Enfocus Neo, which allows you to literally edit the complete PDF structure, is perhaps a very innovative product, but with very limited use. Neo enables you to “break” into a PDF, while PDF is an output—definitive!—format, not meant to be edited at all.
