With Enfocus having released Pitstop Pro 08, Markzware intensively marketing FlightCheck Pro and firms like Zevrix almost contstantly updating their preflighting applications and plug-ins, preflighting documents seems like an absolute necessity. Preflighting is done to prepare a document for printing. It rarely serves any other purpose, and even the very shallow and basic preflight functionality that comes standard with InDesign is aimed at ensuring all elements to print correctly are embedded in the file. Preflighting is rarely ever done for output to the web, unless that output is a PDF file that somehow will end up on a printing press --digital or not.

Preflighting a document involves checking it for errors in the output to print or screen. Applications such as InDesign CS3 feature preflighting functionality, but stop at showing you whether fonts are missing, or whether all colours are in the correct colour space. That functionality may be enough if you intend to publish your layout design and content to the web only, but it is far from elaborate enough for printed output.

Markzware has been developing FlightCheck for years, in several formats --including a highly efficient and successful online service-- to accommodate for printed output, checking for trapping errors and compliance with standards such as PDF/X, for example. FlightCheck can be deployed early in the publishing process, which theoretically saves money as errors are discovered earlier and can be corrected before they cause trouble at the printing press.

The ROI of early preflighting depends on the type of workflow

However, the ROI of preflight tools that come in early in the process aren’t as clear cut as common logic would have it. Companies like Enfocus (now part of EskoArtwork) don’t even bother to preflight early in the publishing process. Enfocus’ Pitstop Professional 08 is a system of plug-ins that integrate with Adobe Acrobat and preflight at the output stage: when the PDF that is supposed to be ready to be printed, is loaded in Acrobat.

Enfocus’ approach has many advantages: you can correct the PDF while it’s in Acrobat, you can even automate the whole process by buying Pitstop Server instead of the Professional version.  Adobe itself selected callas Software’s technology for preflighting. callas’ technology developed for Acrobat 9 is at the same time the foundation for callas’ new pdfToolbox product line.

With a continuing effort to embed preflighting technology in Acrobat and not in InDesign, Adobe seems to follow the reasoning behind EnFocus and callas Software’s products: preflighting early in the process doesn’t save that huge amounts of money as common logic would dictate. One company of early preflight technology doesn’t agree. For years now, Markzware tries to convince the world that early preflighting does save a lot of money.

The truth is that it depends on your workflow (read the ”When do you need to preflight; the ROI discussion” article).