Welcome to this instructional video of Markzware's FlightCheck Professional.
I'm Rick and I'll guide you through the basics, as well as tips and tricks of
this outstanding preflight tool that is a must-have for everybody working with
digital files.
When you start up FlightCheck Professional, you'll be prompted with its menu bar,
containing all that you need to make sure that your document is checked for
all potential prepress problems.
The Ground Controls are the heart of FlightCheck,
and with a little time and effort creating the right settings,
you'll gain maximum profit from all its possibilities.
As you can see, there are lots of rules FlightCheck can look for,
and without going over them all,
you can see that we have tabs for File Settings, Colors, Pages, Trapping,
Page Setup, Forms, Print Settings and, of course, a huge tab for Images.
To set a rule to either give you a warning or error, you simply click on it.
One click will give you a small dot. FlightCheck will give you a warning
if, in this case, an ICC profile is found.
A second click will show a bigger dot,
giving you an error, if the item is found. A third click will turn the rule off.
Once you've made the settings that are important to check for in your workflow,
it will be stored under the Set pull-down menu.
This menu will give you control of everything that has to do with Ground Control sets.
You can create new Ground Control sets,
lock your set with a password,
export them to let your customers or colleagues use the settings that you've made,
or import them, if you receive sets from a third party.
But, now, let me show you the best way to create a good Ground Control set
that will suit your needs and will give you a 100% accurate
report on your file.
First choose New Set from this menu and give it a suitable name.
Let's call this one New Set and then click on OK.
FlightCheck will now make a copy of the
Ground Control set that was present before.
Now go back to the Set menu. Note that the New Set is created
and select the option Turn All Off.
All rules are then switched off.
After that, start working with the set. Make sure you get feedback from all
stages of the workflow following yours, and make the adjustments.
I guarantee you that you will have a
perfect Ground Control set within two weeks.
Please note that the rules that you just saw were the rules for checking
open file types like InDesign,
Quark, Illustrator, etc.
But, since checking PDF files is something totally different from checking open files,
Markzware created special Ground Controls for checking PDF files.
Just go to the File menu, select Preflight Mode
and choose the PDF set in the language of your choice.
What you see here is that FlightCheck has changed the Ground Control set
to one with the rules that have been specially designed to check PDF files.
Again, you'll be able to go through all the tabs
to make your settings suit you best,
creating new sets the way I explained before.
For your convenience, we've already added the PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 settings,
but feel free to create your own or to use the Get More option.
This option will bring you to our website, where you can download
the Ghent Workgroup settings.
Switching back to the set for open files works the same way,
but to make life easier, FlightCheck has a preference setting that will make
FlightChecks switch automatically between your set of open files
and the set for checking PDF files, depending on which kind of file you present.
Well, now that we've created a nice Ground Control set,
let's drop a file into FlightCheck and actually see what happens.
All you're to do is to get the file you want to check and simply drop it onto
the FlightCheck icon in your document.
FlightCheck will now open and do a third check,
not only on the file itself, but all the elements embedded or linked to this file,
like Illustrations or fonts.
On default, two windows will be presented:
the Result window
and the general Overview window.
First, I'll show you the Result window, because this provides all of the
information needed to get started on whatever has to be corrected,
or to start up communication with your client.
As you can see here,
errors are in red
and warnings are in blue.
Clicking on the error will show the file names of the elements used in the
document that were flagged.
In this case, it shows that the elements
contain a resolution that is out of range.
FlightCheck will provide you with the name of the element,
the document name in which the element is present,
and the page on which the element can be found in the document.
The same information is present for the other rules that were flagged:
the element name, the file name, and the page.
Perfect!
Since you might need more specific information over an error,
there is the general Overview window. It will show you the same information as
the Result window, but in more detail.
Errors, again, are in red
and warnings are in blue.
Even though it might seem a little difficult to understand at first,
this window is actually quite easy to read.
Just in case you're not sure what a particular symbol means,
just hover your mouse over the icon and you'll be presented with an explanation.
It's as easy as that!
Let's have a look at the Image section.
On every element, we're now able to find out a lot of information.
Here, you'll find a page number where the element can be found,
the status,
the type,
and color modes.
As you can see, there are two columns that display resolution:
the DPI column shows the original resolution of the element.
Due to scaling, however, the DPI value changes, resulting in the output value.
Since this is the most important value,
FlightCheck will keep a close eye on this value.
If you still need more information than displayed in this window,
just double click on one and find a new window, providing you all information
FlightCheck could retrieve for you.
In this window, you'll find information from the creator,
the version, the size and scaling, to the name of the ICC profile they've used.
It will also provide a preview of the illustration, if available, and shows you
all colors and fonts that came with the image.
It is even possible to open the image from this window.
Now, let's go to some of the interesting features of FlightCheck.
Here, for instance, we have a button that will lead us to the page layout.
A schematic overview of the pages, with on the left side of the list,
all the elements found on that particular page.
Clicking on an element from that list will show me exactly where the element is
located on the page,
making locating and correcting errors much easier.
You could even get through your entire document like this and, from here,
it is even possible to open your document in the application that it was created in.
FlightCheck's button bar also provides a
button to open the document straight away,
one for rechecking the file after you make changes to the document,
and one to print a report of the findings.
The Collection button hands you the great feature of collecting all elements
needed to guarantee a good output for your file.
It enables you to set the location of the collected file.
You can set .zip compression to prevent
file corruption during digital sending of your files,
and choose any name for that compressed file, leaving the original file name intact.
It will also provide information on the total amount of files that will be
collected and the size of the uncompressed document.
On default, FlightCheck will create sub-folders when collecting your file,
but, if you want to customize these settings or folder names,
just click File Class,
and then click on File Class Options button.
In this window, you can change the settings
and change the name, if required.
Hitting the Collect button will start the collecting.
Make sure all files are collecting.
FlightCheck will present a zip collection
in the location you requested.
The red cross in the image tells you that there was still errors in the file when
it was collected.
This is your last chance to rethink sending the file.
If the file was okay at collection, the compressed file would look like this.
To demonstrate what FlightCheck collected, we unpack the file.
As you can see, there is a report created by FlightCheck. A font folder is created,
containing all the fonts needed for the file and the used elements.
The image folder contains all images used in the document and, of course, the
document itself is present in the folder.
This concludes my demonstration of Markzware's FlightCheck Professional.
I hope that this was useful for you.
If you have a comment, please let us know. Purchase information,
reseller information, and contact information can be found at our website at
markzware.com
This is Rick, signing off.