Checking for almost every conceivable error, FlightCheck 6.x is one of the best preflighting tools available.
Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional 6.x has all the ingredients to make desktop publishers, prepress people and printers happy. Its interface has become more informative and better organised. The application is more intelligent as well, switching between PDF preflighting and other preflighting modes automatically. It’s more flexible too, with font and image paths that can be set and prioritised.
Strengths of FlightCheck Professional remain the ability to set up different warning levels, the integration with PDF/X workflows, and the early-in-the-process preflighting, which can save costs in some workflow environments.
Markzware makes a lot of noise around FlightCheck’s early preflighting advantage, and they are right doing so. However, it is important to note that early-in-the-process preflighting will improve ROI especially (if not only) in environments where layout files enter the workflow from unknown sources. This includes about all magazine and newspaper workflows, as each advert or classified ad that enters the workflow in its original format, usually comes from someone with limited knowledge of layout design and printing.
FlightCheck Professional 6.x’s Preferences have panels where you can set various font directories. On my Mac, the application had already set up all the default folders that normally contain fonts. If you’re using FontExplorer to turn fonts on and off for different purposes, FlightCheck Pro 6 can keep an eye on the fonts that are actually in your fonts folder at any time. But again, this feature is especially useful in specific working environments, but not in all. Use a font server like Universal Type Server, and you’ll immediately be confronted with the limitations of the system in this respect.
FlightCheck Professional 6.x improves interface
To manage font information you will have to tell FlightCheck 6 where your active fonts live. The program will then build its font database and you’ll be all set to go. The same can be done for images. If you have documents that refer to images on a volume that’s not necessarily the document path, you can still set up FlightCheck so that it will search for images on different volumes.
These can even be volumes that you don’t mount all the time. If you add a path to FlightCheck after you’ve preflighted a document which you know has images from a folder that’s not in FlightCheck’s image path database, you can add it later and the application will automatically preflight the document again as soon as the new path gets added.
Other improvements to FlightCheck 6 include a better organised interface. Now, when the application is ready preflighting, you get the errors in a much improved overview window, with Ground Controls showing the buttons that have problems and a detailed window explaining what went wrong with the file. I must say I find this to be the best improvement of them all, because it has improved up to the point that it becomes difficult to miss anything, and that’s precisely what you want.
Another major improvement is the autoswitching between flightplans. FlightCheck Professional being a stand-alone application, it looked a bit odd that you should have to manually switch between PDF and non-PDf preflighting jobs. Well, now you don’t have to anymore. The application will do it by itself. It will even clean up after your previous preflight job, closing all the windows before it starts preflighting the next job.
In one word, most improvements in FlightCheck Professional 6 have to do with saving time and making the reporting less prone to misinterpretation. I might also add that it all looks much nicer, but I’m sure everyone will agree that’s only a detail.
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