Hi, everybody! David Dilling from Markzware here,
and today, we're here with yet another exciting release:
FlightCheck 6.80.
That's right, FlightCheck
a stand-alone application for Macintosh
is now out with QuarkXPress 9, as well as Adobe Creative Suite
CS5.5 support,
also let's not forget this version will also work under Lion or
Mac OS 10.7.
This is very exciting release,
for once again, FlightCheck is a tool that can, not only preflight
all your DTP file formats that you commonly use,
however, it will also allow you to package,
not only Quark and InDesign files
but also
Adobe Illustrator
and Photoshop font files.
Well, what I mean is that it'll collect your entire Photoshop file or entire
Illustrator document with all the artwork. That's right, still the one,
FlightCheck, after all these years, Old Faithful out with another version;
and I'd like to go give you a little demonstration of some of the new features
and functions
and a little review on how FlightCheck
can help you preflight and package all of your graphic designs.
Alright, let's go check it out!
Graphic designers, publishers,
prepress operators, printers, just cruise on over
to the FlightCheck
product page on markzware.com
and select FlightCheck here.
If you cruise down a bit, you'll see there is a download,
a 30-day free trial version.
Let's just jump right to that.
Of course, we click download and a window opens
with a link
to our web Store.
You'll see there's a nominal fee, which is minused out.
We simply hit Checkout.
Once you finish the order, you'll get the thank you screen
there and also in the email you'll receive separately,
will be your FlightCheck 6.80
activation key or license code.
So, now as a
prepress operator or
layout artist at a publishing company,
you copy that code
and click here to get the download, the installer.
The download takes mere seconds.
You'll see we have a data folder, which must stay here,
disabled rules and rules,
which will be showing up in our Ground Controls, a very important part of FlightCheck.
Please read the
PDFs and release notes to get a full understanding of how to operate
FlightCheck.
However,
it is quite simple and will show you quickly how to get started.
Just double-click the FlightCheck icon application here.
Okay, you'll see what pops up, and this will hold true, if you want to
use your full license code or just
use the
demonstration code
that will work for 30 days, full working version.
So, as a
graphic designer or prepress operator, you can get a real idea of how it works in the
workflow.
Alright, so we've copied and pasted the code. We can either enter just the last digit
part of the code
or we can just paste the entire code in here, which we'll do
and we hit Next.
At the very last part here,
even though it says licensed for this system,
please hit Finish.
FlightCheck 6.80
on our Macintosh here.
Let's see how it can preflight and package
QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator,
even PDF, EPS, TIFF, individual images. Let's see how it can preflight and package
all the artwork that's used, even, for instance, fonts within
EPS files that have not been embedded.
Let's see how that works.
Okay, here is the FlightCheck
FlightStrip up top,
and it's very important to first go into the
Show Ground Controls,
and here in the Ground Controls, we can see all the different areas where FlightCheck can
check for,
for instance, in Images,
we can see all the checks available for checking our images.
You'll see we've set up a default
set of checks
that are let's say most commonly used
used to find the most common problems.
These issues might include image failing,
tracking applied to your picture,
transfer functions,
an ICC profile used within images,
and, of course, the list goes on:
For instance, in colors,
mismatched spot for process colors,
unused spot colors.
One small dot is a warning
and if you click twice, you'll get a big
dot or square, which is
shown as an error.
Warnings will show blue, errors red.
We can check for hairlines and even adjust the width.
To be specific
for our workflow,
in transparencies,
or
if the ink coverage,
or CMYK,
values are too high for
that page.
And there's a lot more.
We have excellent instructional tutorials
on how to use
the Ground Controls and FlightCheck in general on YouTube,
and you can check out the link down below.
another tip with the Ground Controls in FlightCheck
would be to
collaborate with your
printer or prepress operators or prepress department
to help set up these preflight checks. It's very important so that you can make sure the
checks will be valid for what you're trying to print.
It is quite common
for all workflows out there,
there is the top ten problems,
and I recommend that you start by setting up the Ground Control to check for at least top
ten problems,
you know, RGB images might be one of your top ten problems.
Missing or non-embedded fonts are certainly...
missing, non-embedded images, for sure.
These sort of problems you definitely want to have checked for here in Ground Controls.
Ground Controls can be imported or exported,
and that's a great way for you to share with other designers in your workflow,
or other prepress operators, if you're on the printing side. The beauty of FlightCheck is
it's a tool for, not only
prepress in the printing side of things, but also a tool for
graphic designers, graphic artists,
and layout artists within publishing companies or
advertising agencies...
So, that makes it a wonderful tool to sort of
glue everything together from design
through prepress
right to the print shop.
To preflight a file, you can drag and drop a file onto the FlightCheck icon,
or you can just go here to File > Open.
You'll see very quickly FlightCheck gives us a FlightCheck Results screen
and you'll notice, in this case,
in red the particular problems that we have.
In this particular file, we see non-CMYK Pantone colors used, an
RGB image,
a layered image, and this image used as an ICC profile.
In the next screen, we'll get all the details of that file.
In the main FlightCheck window, we can see what type of file it is, in this case,
an Adobe Photoshop CS5 file.
We get version information, date created, modified,
and we see that ICC profile which was used
We get all the elements of the file:
Page,
Page Info, Print Info, Page List,
and even supporting,
which would where you see plugins or xtensions used,
but the main areas - your colors, fonts, images - this is where you're going to get the most out of
FlightCheck,
as a designer or prepress operator.
For instance, in the Image section, we can very quickly see this image has fonts used
within it.
In this case, of course, it would because it's a
Photoshop, a .psd native file with fonts used and we get a small preview even
of how that looks.
Here's all the fonts which are used and we can even open this image to edit it further
if we wanted to.
New with FlightCheck 6.80
for printers, publishers,
and graphic designers,
is the ability to preflight CS5.5 all files: Photoshop, Illustrator,
InDesign,
and PDFs created from those files, as well.
And also newly added is QuarkXPress 9 support.
Now, that is very important, because the new App Studio from Quark seems to be drawing
some attention
from InDesign users. Check out Quark again
and we do have conversion tools, InDesign to Quark, and Quark to InDesign, in which you might
also be interested and check out.
Furthermore, in FlightCheck, we now have added Mac 10.7 for Lion
support
has been added
also into the new FlightCheck v6.80. Now, I want to show you a very cool feature
in this FlightCheck v6.80,
which is extremely handy for graphic designers, as well as people archiving
and on the print side,
and that is how can we
package a Photoshop file?
How can we package
Illustrator artwork?
Well, let me show you how that works.
So, to package an InDesign file, to collect a QuarkXPress file,
to package a Photoshop file with fonts,
is very easy with FlightCheck.
It should be noted that InDesign CS5.5 or lower has no package
feature for Photoshop
and, for that matter, also not for Illustrator, nor can they preflight the
file in Photoshop or Illustrator, as well. FlightCheck can do it all: InDesign, Photoshop,
Illustrator,
even Quark.
You just go up here to what we call Collect Job.
You select Collect Job
and you'll get the next collect screen.
Let's call it the package job,
but that's the Adobe terminology.
Let's take a closer look at this window.
It might not be the most beautiful window in FlightCheck,
but it is perhaps one of the most powerful.
The collect job window or package job window
has a lot of details.
You can create an individual folder and even
make a specific archive and location for that to be saved to.
What I like, and a lot of our users like, is you can also compress the job
This makes it easy for you to send to the next party. For instance, as a designer to the
printer,
or as somebody as a layout artist
within a publishing company to the prepress department.
We can see the total file count, total job size uncompressed.
We see here all the collectable or packagable file classes.
We see the document itself,
font files, suit cases used, the Type 1 font files,
and we'll even get a preflight report to collect along with the file.
Keep in mind, FlightCheck makes a copy
of all these files. It does not send the original.
Down below, you'll see the exact location where FlightCheck will gather all of these fonts
and files from.
Really it's quite simple for the user. Once again, you preflight the job.
You, of course, address any
quality issues,
and he simply hit
Collect Job and the Collect button.
It's that easy!
(chime sounds)
It happens so fast, if you blink, you'll miss it.
Here's that file with the name we just gave it.
If we decompress that,
we'll get a folder
and in that folder, we'll get the report, the preflight report we just discussed.
We'll see a copy
of the .psd file
and
all the fonts
used in that job.
It was that quick! It was that easy
with FlightCheck from Markzware.
Those were some of the new features in FlightCheck 6.80.
There is a lot more under,
under the hood, so to speak.
Here is that QuarkXPress document we just preflighted,
and you'll see you can also do the same thing, collect the job, all fonts and images into
one folder
and
there's a lot more that I'm not covering.
In the Preferences, for instance, we go into a lot of details on relative paths
and where to look for images other than
in one particular location, which may be on another server.
There's a lot of things, like Auto Preflight Detection,
which is a very powerful
set of rules, where you can switch those Ground Controls we showed you
earlier,
depending on the file type.
So, for a PDF file, you're going to have a different set of checks,
or for a native Illustrator file, or for an InDesign file.
Very powerful tools
that are within the
FlightCheck 6.80.
Also, under Views,
Show Page Layout
is vital for any designer or prepress operator that wants to actually go back and fix
the problems found.
We can click on any item and see exactly where it is in the document
and even launch the document to go fix the problems ourselves.
There is a,
like I said before, a FlightCheck FlightStrip,
where you can see all of the nice icons and quickly go to Page Layout or your
Preferences or your Ground Controls.
Very handy!
Alright, folks, that's been FlightCheck v6.80 from Markzware.
You can see that the tool is,
once again,
just like Old Faithful,
it's still here after all these years,
and it will
pre-flight check
Illustrator, Photoshop... Very important because many people don't even realize
that FlightCheck
can give a quality assurance check on those files
but also package all the fonts used in Photoshop,
or package all the artwork and fonts used in Illustrator .ai files.
Extremely handy!
And, of course, it'll do the same preflight and package for Adobe InDesign
and QuarkXPress,
but now added:
Creative Suite 5.5 support
Quark 9 support and Lion 10.7 support
If you want to buy FlightCheck today, which I recommend you do, just cruise on over to our
web page
To order FlightCheck, just go to the webpage
markzware.com/products/flightcheck
and click the Buy Now button.
It'll be one investment
you'll be very glad you made.
Not only will FlightCheck help you to find problems in your files,
it'll help you to organize and package or collect all your files for
archiving or sending to the next party.
Extremely handy!
With one application on the Macintosh, you can do all these great things:
a quality assurance preflight check and package, not only InDesign and Quark,
but also your Photoshop and your Illustrator artwork.
Very handy to have around in the old toolbox!
David Dilling for Markzware, signing off.