Product Reviews

Preflighting - the process of making sure files have an error-free journey from screen to print - has become something of an art in itself. Although many desktop publishing applications include basic error-trapping and file collection features, bureaux and printers have come to rely on dedicated preflighting tools, which offer more power and versatility.

This latest update to the best-known of these, MarkzWare's FlightCheck Professional, offers a critical and long-awaited feature: support for the latest versions of Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

The ability to check Adobe Creative Suite files adds to a compelling list of file formats that FlightCheck can examine. Alongside QuarkXPress 6, version 5.5 also covers Acrobat 6 and Macromedia FreeHand MX documents and even Word and PowerPoint formats. Usefully, FlightCheck can search for errors in these applications even if they are not installed on the same machine, so the program acts as a gatekeeper to check incoming or outgoing files without having to pay for extra licences.

FlightCheck Professional's main role is to examine files for 150 or so potential output problems that vary from obvious errors, such as missing fonts or images saved in RGB format, to less serious issues, including rotated image files that can cause delay at output stage.

You can tweak settings in FlightCheck's Ground Controls window to tailor whether specified conditions should be reported as errors, warnings, or whether they should be ignored entirely. Sadly, the Ground Controls window itself has changed little over the years: always unintuitive, it now looks jarringly dated in the Mac OS X environment and remains as cluttered as ever.

Specified Ground Controls can be saved as sets and exported, so you can keep settings for different kinds of documents. FlightPlans, which extend the concept of Ground Controls to the entire user interface, were introduced in FlightCheck 5, but see little return on their potential here: there is still only a single PDF FlightPlan on offer with no way to create your own from scratch.

When a document is scanned, FlightCheck indicates errors and warnings via both

ADVERTISEMENT

a simple Results window and a more detailed listing of errors (flagged in red) or warnings (shown in blue). FlightCheck also offers a Page Geometry view, which shows a thumbnail representation of the document being checked, with problem areas highlighted. If you click on these areas you should be able to open the document to correct the error, although we found that with QuarkXPress 6 we had to manually point FlightCheck to the correct application location to begin with.

Once errors have been dealt with, FlightCheck can collect the document and files into a single folder, compressing it on the fly if necessary. However, unlike similar collect for output functions in QuarkXPress or InDesign, FlightCheck by default doesn't neatly separate fonts and images into separate folders.

FlightCheck 5.5 adds some useful extras. It can now detect similarly named spot colours, such as Pantones, and a more versatile approach to fonts has also been adopted. Previously, missing screen and printer fonts were flagged even when they only appeared on a style sheet and not in the document itself, now you can elect to only be warned of missing fonts when actually used in the document. FlightCheck has also added the option of warning a user when multiple fonts of the same name are found in the system, a surprisingly common occurrence when you consider the various hiding places for fonts on Mac OS X systems.

FlightCheck 5 was rewritten from scratch for OS X. Two casualties of this transition were support for AppleScript and third-party font management tools. Thankfully both features have made a return; the healthy scripting dictionary means the program can resume its place in an automated workflow.

But there are still odd gaps in functionality. A continuing irritation is that when you correct errors in an open document, FlightCheck doesn't automatically rescan it afterwards. Instead you have to manually check it again from the program's Toolbar.

But FlightCheck's critical weakness remains its performance under OS X. The program's speed is pedestrian enough even on a dual 2GHz G5, but working with a lengthy InDesign document on a low-end G4 it qualifies as glacial compared to earlier Classic versions. In fairness, this sluggishness is partly unavoidable, such as having to scan the numerous locations for font files in OS X.

With rival Extensis PreFlight Pro still to make the jump to OS X, there are few other options for those who need a standalone preflight checker in this era of subscription-based preflight services. Even so, FlightCheck Professional 5.5 is only a must-have update for existing users who need to check FreeHand MX or Adobe Creative Suite documents. Otherwise this is an update that can be comfortably skipped.