Product Reviews

As publishers and designers move closer to CTP (computer to plate) and digital print, preflighting documents prior to output is a more complex process than ever, involving multiple applications and multiple profiles according to different types of job. Though popular, Preflight Pro 1.0 was ultimately limited as a QuarkXPress-only program. But with version 2.0, Extensis has at last seized the multi-application nettle by supporting the key design packages in a flexible and powerful upgrade.

Preflight Pro 2.0 can recognise and check through documents created with XPress 3.3 and 4.0, Adobe PageMaker 6.5, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and 5.0, Adobe Illustrator 7.0 and 8.0, Macromedia FreeHand 7.0 and 8.0, and Multi-Ad Creator 2. However, we found that FreeHand files could only be inspected if they had been exported as EPS documents first, while native-format Illustrator and Photoshop files presented no problem. There's no support for preflighting Acrobat PDFs.

The package revolves around a Job Jacket window which gives general information on the files you want to inspect. This is an important feature within Preflight Pro since other preflight solutions tend to work with one file at a time. Here, you can add any number of files of different formats to the list, even by dragging and dropping a folder onto the Job Jacket window.

With one or more files selected in the list, you can carry out a full inspection on them by clicking on the tick in the button bar. Potential problems are indicated in a general way with little red page icons, and you can obtain more information in the other Job Jacket tabs, such as a shorter list of graphic files, fonts and colours used, a log of what's been added and inspected so far, plus any notes you wish to add along the way. A comprehensive Report window can be called up for any inspected file, showing the location and nature of any problems it has found.

In most cases, you can

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drill down to find more detail on a problem by double-clicking an entry in the Report window. However, many of the Info windows look the same and you need to remember that the Report window contains information on all inspected documents in the Job Jacket, not just the documents you've selected. This can result in time wasted looking in the wrong place, giving the impression that it's hidden deep in the hierachy of Info windows.

This is in sharp contrast to profile-building, which is very easy. You might build a profile for press jobs, another for Web publishing, another for non-DTP graphics-only jobs, and so on. Preferences within each profile you create are selected with small pop-up menus, from which you choose whether the program should warn you of a potential problem, flag something as a definite error or ignore it completely. It could barely be simpler, although as is the case throughout Preflight Pro 2.0, the dialog boxes are gappy and take up a lot of unnecessary screen space .

One of the package's star features is the Pilot, called up from the Report window. The Pilot takes the list of problems from the report and locates them on screen in the document for you at the click of a button. It remains unobtrusive as a small floating palette as you work in the document's application. A similar feature is available in other preflighters, but Preflight Pro's Pilot takes you to the heart of a flagged problem: not just the location in the document but also the appropriate dialog box for correcting it.

After inspecting the files, you can collect for print and compress the lot with a couple of clicks, or allow Preflight Pro's Watch folders and AppleScript support to do it all automatically. Any printer or bureau with a copy of Preflight Pro can re-open your entire Job Jacket information when they receive your files, which can be scanned quickly on screen rather than forcing them to check through report print-outs. In the same way, you can open up jobs collected with the entry-level Extensis Collect Pro 2.0. Preflight Pro 2.0 includes five free serial numbers for Collect Pro 2.0, which can be handed to colleagues or clients to help regiment the copy flow: all they have to do is download the utility from the Extensis Web site at no cost.

The most significant improvement in this upgrade is the expanded application support, but you can't underestimate its overall usability. Preflight Pro 2.0 is quite possibly the least complicated preflighter around, and certainly the easiest to learn.