Can I collect
the fonts that are going to be used in my documents that are going to be printed
professionally?
Hi, everybody! David Dilling for Markzware
and today, I want to show you something I came across after checking the alerts for
keyword FlightCheck.
I came across this article from Fonts of Knowledge.
This was written by Action Graphics all-service printing and
mail film company in New Jersey
in the United States.
It's a great article, telling you a little bit about background about fonts and what-not.
The first line sort of says it all.
More than twenty years after the advent of electronic publishing,
printers still cite font issues among the top problems they encounter with clients'
files.
So, they do mention there are,
you know, there is light at the end of the tunnel,
and one of those points of light you can see here, and I'll put a link down below
so you can read the full article,
is the following:
the biggest problem print providers have is clients not supplying all fonts used
in the document.
Corralling fonts manually can be difficult. It's best to use external applications
that can automatically collect fonts, such as Marksware's FlightCheck,
for submitting a job to ensure that all fonts are available.
When collecting fonts,
either for output or
collaboration purposes,
pay attention to the foundry,
the font foundry.
ITC's Garmin differs from Bitstream's Garmin, which differs from Adobe's Garmin.
They're often subtle differences among them and interchanging them can result in,
at best, a missing font warning or, at worst, text free-flowing
ruining a carefully-designed layout.
Alright, so here we are in FlightCheck. I'm going to give you a full demo. There's plenty of other videos
on how to set up the Ground Controls, how to preflight, how to fix your problems,
and how to automatically switch your
checks from PDF to Illustrator to InDesign, etc.
Really cool!
Right of the box, it comes with default Ground Controls, and if you get a test file
which
we're going to grab here,
apart from InDesign, I'll show you how it does it, how FlightCheck collects an
Illustrator file.
So, you can just drop the file, whatever it is, PDF, Illustrator,
even Word files, just drop them on FlightCheck and see what it tells you.
FlightCheck gathers all important details about this file.
You see the Ground Controls switch automatically to checks more based for
Iillustrator files, instead of PDF checks, which are far different.
We get all information, colors, trapping,
fonts,
and images.
We get a results screen.
Red are problems. Blue are warnings.
I just wanna highlight one thing, without going over too much of the interface.
FlightCheck will show you the font name,
even if the printer font file required,
if it's been stylized, which is a no-no,
and the type of font it is,
just so you know the type font,
but most importantly, as discussed in the Action Graphics post,
we'll show you the version, the exact version of that font,
set up the conversions for the same font name,
and the exact manufacturer.
We go here to collect
or package, as they say in the Adobe world.
We can gather
all used images,
all used fonts, even the suitcases required,
and you see everything we're going to gather here, even a little preflight report and we can
compress the job, very handy if you going to send it to your printer, for instance.
Plus it collects. Let's see how that works. It's really easy. Just one click
and FlightCheck will package fonts, or collect all fonts and images used in
major DTP documents and artwork.
(chime sounds) That's a good sound.
Here, we see the file and we see a little
X on the icon saying, "Watch out. There are problems."
What you get
in a collected file is the native document itself, in this case,
the Adobe Illustrator file,
all the images in an Images folder that have been collected, that were linked,
and all the fonts within a Fonts folder,
and the preflight report.
It's that easy with Markzware FlightCheck to
get control of, not only your fonts,
but also your images, and your entire layout. An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure.
That's what the article hints at, as well.
On the FlightCheck page, you'll get a full video demonstration,
and a link to many more videos in this playlist, about thirty videos in all, educational
on how to set up your Ground Controls and tips and tricks.
You can learn more about FlightCheck
and most importantly, you can download a 30-day demo to try yourself,
a full working version.
You can see for yourself, not only how easy it is to check, but package and collect
all your fonts and images with FlightCheck.
Highlighting the Fonts of Knowledge article over on Action Graphics
web page
I'll put a link to it. Check it out.
David from Markzware, saying
have a fine day. Happy Holidays!
Until the next time...