By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, December 27, 2006 - 11:42:00

http://www.markzware.com

Preflighting is very easy with FlightCheck Studio for QuarkXPress 7. FlightCheck Studio is an XTension, and can be customised to do exactly what you want. The Studio version can’t check your document against the Ghent WorkGroup policies, but it does preflight against PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3.

Most designers and desktop publishers will have enough preflighting power with FlightCheck Studio. Those that require more, should buy FlightCheck Professional, which is a stand-alone preflighting application. Unfortunately, FlightCheck Professional does not yet support QuarkXPress 7.

FlightCheck Studio has three levels of complexity. It can be used out-of-the-box, with little customisation, and fully customised.

Preflighting with FlightCheck Studio can be extremely easy: you can just use the Default policies and hit the “Check” button, after which your document will be preflighted using all the default policies. These cover general office or PDF output, but nothing more. They will, for example, not check whether your transparency settings will print on a Fiery RIP.

The second level of complexity happens when the user changes some of the default policies. For example, I wanted to check whether my file would create problems when output to Acrobat 8, and using A4 letter page size. Not surprisingly, the coloured box on the page was reported as too close to the edge of the paper.

A third level of complexity is when you customise the whole application. This means you are going to create your own policies. I must admit that I find this a very tedious process. There are literally dozens of rules you can set; it depends on your workflow whether you need them all. But even if you don’t need all of them, you must go through all the rules to make sure you’re not missing any.

Reporting in FlightCheck Studio for QuarkXPRess 7 is quite extensive. You can see flagged items in a separate panel right in the application’s interface. But you can also export a report to a text file or a new QuarkXPress document.

When an item is flagged as possibly causing problems, you can fix it. To that effect, FlightCheck Studio will send a command to QuarkXPress 7 in order to rectify the trouble-causing item. Some problems can be automatically fixed, some need manual intervention, and some are so complex, FlightCheck will only warn you so that you can fix it yourself.