Markzware FlightCheck® Professional ($499) is your prepress application used to manage quality control for printing. This solution provides both native file and PDF preflight checking and is backed by a United States patent. FlightCheck is an essential tool for Print Shops, Creative Designers, Prepress Departments, Customer Service Reps and Graphics Professionals within the digital print and publishing industries; helping you prepare PDF and other document types for commercial printing.
I have not used Flightcheck before so I can not compare it to previous versions but research indicates that it is faster, is now Universal Binary, and deals well with QuarkXPress 7 and InDesign CS3. Usefully it builds a font file when you load the application for the first time which must be a blessing for those with lots of fonts installed, and not necessarily all in the same place.
For my part I found the page layout, images, fonts etc in the Ground Control settings intuative, well layed out and easy to use. The ability to create sets for later use was particularly useful, and although my own skills and use was probably at the lower end of the target user market I didn’t come across a file format that it couldn’t handle.
For heavy PDF users I would imagine that the PDF Ground Control set will push all the right buttons for you. I found it more than satisfactory the times that I used it.
All in all I would say this was an impressive application. Not something I have a particular need for on a day to day basis, but enjoyable and impressive all the same.
Product Overview
FlightCheck helps you create excellent PDF files for brochures, advertisements, manuals, and virtually any printed document. It provides complete quality control saving printers and publishers time and money by avoiding re-printing jobs.
FlightCheck preflights digital files thoroughly and warns you about potential printing problems while guiding you directly to them for repair. It issues a complete analysis of the print job highlighting potential errors, item by item, including wrong document size, missing fonts, incorrect colors, transparency of spot colors, incorrect image resolution and much more. FlightCheck then collects all required elements of the print job, such as images and fonts, to insure that jobs print as expected.
One of the key capabilities of FlightCheck Professional is its power to preflight a wide variety of file formats and image types. A partial list includes – QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Acrobat PDF, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe FreeHand, Microsoft Office, CorelDRAW, EPS, TIFF and many more.
The FlightCheck Ground Control tool gives you full control to create and manage hundreds of preflight checklists. Simply by turning on warnings or errors, you can customize inspection to focus on certain aspects of the document. Print production managers can save these profiles, or rule sets for specific print or publishing workflows. The Ground Controls Sets can then be shared by importing them into other user FlightCheck applications.
Industry standard specifications for PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 for print compliancy as well as the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) PDF/X PLUS are special Ground Control Sets built directly into FlightCheck ready for use.
After verification of the print job, FlightCheck Professional generates a detailed preflight report highlighting specific print problems; providing a quick and easy means to navigate to the error for repair. Print shops can review these reports with customers; helping to communicate their print requirements. This communication process helps to educate everyone involved in the print process to create better print-ready documents.
System Requirements
• Min 1GHz G4, G5 or Intel based Mac
• Min 512MB RAM
• 1024 x 768 monitor resolution
• Mac OS X 10.4. – 10.4.9