Product Reviews

Flightcheck 3.3 is the first version of Markzware's preflighting software to work with QuarkXPress 4.0 documents and all file support has been brought bang up to date.

For those new to the term, preflighting software is intended for graphic designers and production managers who need to send jobs for output by another department or by an external bureau. As well as offering a 'collect for print' function, preflight programs also attempt to flag potential problems across the board: not just reporting that a font's missing, but that a certain colour trap setting you're using is inadvisable under a particular set of circumstances. This cuts out many problems at the output stage and inevitably saves money. Many output bureaux also use preflight software to spot problems before wasting any imagesetting time.

FlightCheck's key feature has always been its support for several file formats. Version 3.3 now lets you run checks on DTP documents created in XPress 4.0, PageMaker 6.0, FrameMaker 5.5 and the less well-known Multi-Ad Creator 2.0. Better still, it can tackle a fair number of popular graphic formats, including Illustrator 7.0, the recent FreeHand 8.0 and native Photoshop format. It even diagnoses problems in Acrobat PDF files.

FlightCheck works as a standalone program, so to check a file you don't first need to open the application it was created in. FlightCheck can also be launched from another application for an immediate check.

Its interface is information-heavy to say the least. A main window gives basic details about the content of the checked document, along with buttons which expand the window with more data or open up extra windows as required.

If everything is fine, FlightCheck will show big green ticks everywhere to indicate that the document has passed all its tests. Anything that hasn't passed

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is marked with a large red cross, and all sources of potential problems (including associated graphic file names and page objects) are listed in bright red. You can then drill down to see what's wrong with the file, the page setup, the printer, colours, fonts or images.

This drilling down process is not as intuitive as in certain other preflighting packages - double-clicking on a flagged item doesn't always work - but the explanations given with each flag are clear and concise. Much of FlightCheck's scanning and reporting process can now also be AppleScripted.

Sometimes there will be issues you don't want to see flagged as problems, such as transparent picture boxes or special trapping. FlightCheck allows you to customise the way in which it hunts for problems via its Ground Controls. These are presented as a floating palette which details what the program should check for and what it should ignore. With the Ground Controls correctly configured, FlightCheck becomes not just a powerful preflighter but a relevant one as well.

Naturally, there's a big demand for preflight software from desktop publishers, and so FlightCheck offers an extra facility called Problems Layout. This window shows a representation of a page along with placed image sizes, shapes and locations, which is a helpful memory jogger if the names of the image files mean nothing to you.

Especially useful is the way missing fonts and dodgy colours are identified in files associated with the document being checked, not just within the document itself. Fonts can be analysed and grouped using a built-in Fonts database.

After the checking process you can save or print a report and collect the entire job in one folder - FlightCheck can compress the job transparently using the included StuffIt engine - span it across multiple removable disks or BinHex it for emailing.

It's a slick finish to the best preflight package around. Even the price has come down by around £50 which, although small, is welcome. Our only real reservation is in the area of job bagging (or 'ticketing') for dealing with bureaux, which isn't as well implemented as in Extensis' PreFlight Pro. Also annoying is the lack of a printed manual in the early release, although FlightCheck's Help windows are quite good, and there's a command built into the Help menu for downloading the latest edition of the manual as a PDF file directly from the Internet.