Workflow: In the BeginningCreative & Design

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It is an exciting time to be a graphicsolutions provider. It is also a chal-lenging time as we transition fromour traditional roles as “mid-

dlemen” between graphic designersand printing presses to full service,design-to-print companies. Back in the“old days,” we took files from designers,worked our magic, and handed film offto presses. Now that we are expandingour services both downstream to print-ing and upstream to design, we face anew set of challenges.

In the Beginning Is DesignThe very phrase, “In the Beginning,”conjures up images of creation. FromMichelangelo to Mozart to Madonna,every great work starts with carefulconsideration. Most of this attentionfocuses on the impact of the work andnot the details of production anddelivery. Eventually, every designrequires execution, and that is wherethe technicians and skilled crafts-people take over.

When we consider the flow of printjobs through our prepress depart-ments, often we ignore the creativepart of the process that came beforeand focus on the mechanics of com-pleting the job in a way that meets the

designer’s expectations. We all knowthat graphic designers often have noconcept about what it takes to get ajob on press; we curse them under ourbreath while we struggle to get colorsto separate properly or locate amissing font. Regardless, we smile, rollup our sleeves, and dig in.

What you know about the printingprocess puts you at a huge advantagewhen it comes to being creative, how-ever, and we will discuss some of theways to capitalize on this knowledgeand skill. We, as a community, have aunique opportunity for us to stan-dardize how we approach the designprocess by extending our workflowback to the drawing board, so tospeak. Standards and process controlshelp printers and graphic solutionsproviders to provide high quality, con-sistent output. Employing processcontrols for design helps increase boththe quality of the final product as wellas the ease with which it movesthrough the print process.

Does Standardizing DesignDisrupt the Creative Process?“You can’t standardize design withoutdisrupting the creative process,” saycreatives, many of whom produce

We, as a community,have a unique opportunity tostandardize how we approach the design process byextending our workflow back to the drawing board.

BY James Lockman

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work that makes our prepress departments cringe.Most design schools do not include print produc-tion as part of their curriculum. As a result, theirdesign process includes only the visual aspects oftheir work, not whether their work is cost effective,efficient to produce, or even printable. By consid-ering these print production aspects of a design,you make your company more competitive in analready very competitive marketplace.

One of the crucial parts of your current prepressworkflow is preflight. The preflight step allows you tocatch problems with jobs that will slow or stop pro-duction when the job gets to press. In developingyour preflight protocols, you have identified anumber of issues that creatives miss when designingprinted pieces. In order to achieve meaningfulprocess control in a creative design environment, wemust preflight as part of the design process.

There are many off-the-shelf products to help uspreflight. Leading the pack is Markzware’s(www.markzware.com) FlightCheck family of tools.Ubiquitous among service bureaus and sophisti-cated design agencies, FlightCheck Professional isa powerful and versatile platform for detectingproblems with a wide array of source file types. It isessential in any prepress department, for it can drilldown into a collection of files to see if any of thelinks are missing, damaged, have incorrect colorspaces, low resolution, incompatible versions, haveunsuitable compression, create extra plates, andmuch more. It can look into a collection of Quark-XPress, InDesign, PageMaker, Publisher, Illustrator,and Freehand files as well as PDF, TIFF, EPS, Post-Script, and more.

FlightCheck Professional requires the user todescribe a properly configured job. The user doesthis through a series of conditional checks calledGround Controls: the resolution must be over 266

dpi, the color space must be CMYK, and the fileformat must be QuarkXPress version 5 or below, forinstance. Ground Controls are not application spe-cific, making FlightCheck Pro much more versatilethan many other competing generic preflight prod-ucts on the market today. Creative departments,however, are usually working on one design platform(QuarkXPress or InDesign) with a limited set ofsource files (Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, PDF).

Creatives need a set of preflight tools appropriateto their workflow. InDesign has a limited built-inpreflight functionality, but it is not configurable.QuarkXPress has no built-in preflight functionality.Many agencies have moved away from submittingsource files and have adopted PDF as their inter-change format. Although Acrobat Professional has acapable built-in preflight function that works on itsown or in conjunction with JDF, it affords no optionfor fixing the problems it detects. Fortunately, plug-in vendors have stepped up to fill the voids. We willexplore three solutions here: Badia Software’s Print-Tools, Markzware’s FlightCheck Studio, and EnfocusSoftware’s Instant PDF.

Instant Feedback in QuarkXPressBadia Software (www.badiaxt.com) makes a set of veryuseful Xtensions for QuarkXPress. PrintTools ($99SRP) gives creatives a set of tools to help makeprinting to a local printer easier and more efficient.It is compatible with QuarkXPress versions 4 through6, and requires Mac OS 9 or higher. It provides a livepreview of the document as it will print, the abilityto control tiling, custom slugs, batch printing, printto file, and preflight. The user can select from ninepredefined conditions known to stop jobs: missinglinks, RGB links, missing fonts, overset text, EPS fileswith JPEG compression, nonprinting objects, hair-line rules, image links with unknown formats, and

Preflight checks are eitheron or off with PrintTools.

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low resolution. Resolution is the only configurableoption, allowing the user to set a threshold. All of theother options are either on or off.

Preflighting with PrintTools happens at print time.The user can configure PrintTools to automaticallypreflight at print time, so when creatives makeproofs, they are alerted to problems with the layoutfiles or its links. (See illustration at top of page 18.)The other PrintTools functions, such as customslugs, can help with version control through theproofing process. Its enhanced Save to PS File func-tion allows the user to rename a PS file with addi-tional information including page range, projectname, and serial numbers. For more detailed pre-flight during the design process, we need to look atFlightCheck Studio.

Process Control in InDesign & QuarkXPressFlightCheck Studio ($199 SRP) is a member of theFlightCheck family that works as a plug-in to eitherQuarkXPress 4 through 6 or InDesign CS or CS2. Itrequires Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. It allows you tocreate a set of rules called Design Policies for yourworkflow and then share them with creatives.Design Policies can be password protected so thatthey cannot be altered, allowing you to lock downyour rules for good mechanical design. The set ofavailable checks is specific to each design applica-tion, but they are very similar. All of the itemsdetectable by PrintTools are available plus a wholehost of others. Transparency, for instance, is onlyavailable as a Policy in InDesign, while resolution,missing links, color spaces, and OPI detection areavailable in both versions.

Users of FlightCheck Professional will find itsinterface and usage very familiar but organized ina way that makes it easily accessible to a nontech-nical audience. Items can be set to ignore, light(inform), warn, or flag (error), allowing you todecide just how bad an issue is for your production.(See image at top of next column.) If an error isdetected, the error is listed in the Flagged Items List,and you can click on the item to see where it is inthe layout. You can also have FlightCheck Studioattempt to repair issues it detects. There are manyissues it can’t repair, though, and users are recom-mended in the manual to take care when using therepair function.

One of its best features is preflight on the fly,allowing you to check your layout and its links as

you work. You can preflight at any time, but you canconfigure FlightCheck Studio to preflight wheneveryou open, save, export, or print a job. As a safe-guard, FlightCheck Studio will automatically warnyou if there are any outstanding issues when youcollect your job to send it to production. Once aPolicy has been created, it can be shared with anynumber of users. Policies work on either theQuarkXPress or InDesign version of the plug-in, buta Policy must be created in InDesign in order todetect InDesign-specific issues like transparency.

Sharing Design Policies is easy; simply save thePolicy to a disk or post it to your web site andanyone with FlightCheck Studio can take advantageof your Policies. It is a great way for you to extendyour preflight workflow back to your in-housedesigners and also to your customers. Since you canpassword protect the Policy, you can assure thatyour Policies won’t be altered by anyone else.FlightCheck Studio provides an effective method ofinstituting prepress process controls on the designprocess. For many workflows, though, PDF hasbecome the preferred method of file transmission.

Design Process Controls for PDF WorkflowsPDF workflow has revolutionized how we move workthrough our prepress departments. With standardssuch as PDF/X-1a in place, we can move jobs effi-ciently from submission to press. For many of us,though, PDF/X compliance is only a starting pointfor developing our PDF workflows. We make adjust-ments to suit our specific hardware and software lim-itations and preflight our PDFs accordingly. Afterpreflight, we then face the challenge of makingadjustments to files our customers believe to be“fixed” already simply because they are PDF. Formost of us, although Acrobat Professional has pre-flight capability built-in, we rely on Enfocus Soft-ware’s PitStop Professional and Certified PDF.

Notice that the image “Old Photo.tiff” has an effective resolution of522.379 dpi and has a scaling factor of 85.6 percent.

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Enfocus Software’s (www.enfocus.com) PitStop Pro-fessional is well known as the industry standard toolfor PDF manipulation and correction. With PitStopProfessional, we can edit PDF files to make themcompliant with our standards. To help identifyproblems in PDF, PitStop Professional also containspreflight with automatic correction through PDFProfiles. For items that the preflight mechanismcan’t fix but are repairable through manipulationswith PitStop’s tools, there are Action Lists. ActionLists and PDF Profiles make PitStop Professionalthe basis for a successful and efficient PDF work-flow. PitStop Server allows you to combine ActionLists and PDF Profiles in a Hot Folder to preflightand automatically correct large volumes of PDFwithout any user interaction. In fact, many prepresssystems include PitStop Server as part of theirpackage. Once preflighted with PitStop Pro or Pit-Stop Server, a PDF can be Certified or marked withspecific metadata that declares it fit for a particularworkflow. Many workflow systems can identify Cer-tified PDFs and take advantage of their Certifiedstatus to make the processing more efficient.Designers can also take advantage of Certified PDFwith Instant PDF.

Instant PDF ($199 SRP) is a set of tools forMac OS X or Windows NT/XP that seamlessly knitstogether the OS’s print system, Adobe Distiller,Quartz PDF (on Mac OS machines), QuarkXPressbuilt-in PDF creation, InDesign direct PDF export,and Certified PDF. Remarkably powerful but veryelegant, Instant PDF creates desktop printersknown as Queues that control the PDF creation

and delivery process. Contained within each Queueis a set of Acrobat PDF Settings (joboptions) to con-trol Adobe Distiller, the ability to control InDesign orQuarkXPress PDF export, the ability to create PDFwith Quartz, automatic preflight and Action List exe-cution, and file delivery. PitStop Professional is notnecessary on the creative’s computer, but PitStop isrequired to make the PDF Profiles and Action Listsused by the Queue to Certify PDFs it makes. All ofthe elements necessary to control all aspects ofmaking PDF are encapsulated in the Queue.

The creative has several ways to use a Queue. ForQuarkXPress 6 and InDesign CS (CS 2 support isdue in February 06), a menu item called “Save asCertified PDF” appears in the File menu. Selectingit allows the creative to choose which Queue to useand specify a page range; Instant PDF does the rest.Since Queues appear as desktop printers, anyapplication that can print can create a CertifiedPDF. Since PDF Profiles and Action Lists can con-vert color spaces, it becomes possible to get CMYKor spot color PDFs out of Excel, Word and Publisherwithout having to adjust them with PitStop.

As you might expect, building a Queue properlyrequires some consideration. Because a Queue cancontrol so much of the PDF creation process andinteract with so many different parts of the PDFcreation process, there are many options to con-figure. Operating in Standard mode, you assign aname for the Queue, select a PDF Profile for pre-flight, determine whether you will require the userto preview the PDF before sending it to you, andfinally determine the method of delivery. Instant

The Instant PDF Standard Queue setup requires only a fewconfiguration steps.

Here we specify which Quark PDF Export Options file to usewhen exporting PDF from QuarkXPress.

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PDF contains its own email client and FTP client,so the creative does not have to set up an FTP pro-gram in order to deliver the PDF to you.

In Advanced mode, you have many additionaloptions. You can specify which PDF creationmethods are allowed, which settings to use for eachmethod, and which methods are preferred for spe-cific applications. For instance, if you determine thatLibrary PDF out of InDesign causes problems in yourworkflow, you can disallow direct export and man-date PostScript to Distiller PDF creation. You can alsoadd one or more Action Lists to the Queue, allowingfor sophisticated automated corrections to the PDFon the creative’s desktop.

After the PDF is created and Certified, Instant PDFasks to approve the PDF. A report appears, listing notonly any errors that were found and repairs that weremade, but also providing details about many aspects ofthe PDF. The report conveniently provides explanationsof the issues it found, helping the creative understandthe errors and offering advice for fixing them if theQueue was not set up to do it on its own. Afterapproval, the PDF is delivered to your prepress depart-ment using the methods you defined in the Queue.

The End of the BeginningGetting your process controls to creatives gives yourcompany a competitive advantage, and preflightingon the desktop is a means to that end. From thenearly configuration free PrintTools to the very ver-satile FlightCheck Studio, there are tools to help cre-atives preflight before sending jobs to press. Forshops with PDF workflows, Instant PDF integrateswith the major design environments to start yourPDF workflow at the beginning. CombiningFlightCheck Studio and Instant PDF allows creativesto design to your standards and then inject theirPDFs directly into your workflow.

James Lockman recently conducted a three-part IPAwebinar, Preflighting for Ultimate File Acceptance. Thiscourse is designed to help prepress professionals, cre-ative clients and printers develop best practice habitsfor creating and submitting work for publication.Each session addresses file integrity in the context ofthe complete graphics workflow from design to pre-press to print. This program, which is a highly usefultraining tool, has been archived and may be orderedonline at www.ipa.org/cd or phone 800-255-8141.

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