Check, Check, Check!

Two packaging printers share their ideas on preflighting electronic design files.

IT WAS A printer by the name of Ben Franklin who once quipped "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Farsighted and wise as he was, Ben could never have imagined how true those words would ring for his twenty-first century inky-fingered brethren.

Preflighting—the process of reviewing and repairing incoming electronic files from agencies and designers—is good medicine for avoiding costly and time-consuming problems further down the road in the production process. Whether you use off-the-shelf preflighting software, or have developed your own procedures, the extent to which you examine supplied digital files—and the methods you use for correcting them—can determine whether or not you're making margins in prepress.

Seneca Printing and Label Co., headquartered in Franklin, Pa., has a full-time systems administrator to help define and oversee the preflighting function. Michael Port evaluates and installs all the software used across the company's four flexo and offset plants. He said his company has been using Markzware's FlightCheck since the program was first released to the market.

"Before we began using the software, we could spend many hours manually inspecting incoming files," he explains. Now, using the program's default file-checking parameters, Port says Seneca has been able to substantially streamline the process. "The most common problems are associated with the way designers specify colors. FlightCheck helps us check for spot colors and naming. The next biggest issue is fonts. FlightCheck runs a list of all the fonts used in the job and we compare that to the list of fonts we have in our own library. Lastly, we look at the images to make sure they are in the format, size and resolution we need. If the resolution is too low—which is often the case for images scanned on desktop scanners—we can contact the customer and make sure he's aware that the image may come out pixelized or soft."

Port says his company experimented several years ago with having customer service representatives (CSRs) run the preflighting function, but ultimately decided that the prepress operators, because of their extensive knowledge, offered the better assurance that all the necessary elements would be correct before production was started on the job.

Software may have helped automate job production, but Port says it hasn't lessened the importance of communicating with the customer. Seneca rarely makes changes to a customer's file without making them aware of it. "I'm here for the customers," he says. "Some call me before they even start building a job. That's what I want them to do—so that we can steer them in the right direction."

Port says he works closely with the sales people to establish the right expectations with new customers. The company puts on an annual seminar, publishes two newsletters, and has prepared a comprehensive booklet on preparing electronic designs for print. "We don't penalize customers for not preparing their files correctly, but if we've taken measures to educate them and we still receive files that are time-consuming to fix, we will notify a customer that he's going to incur additional costs."

Vicki Stone, director of technical services for 100-year old Green Printing & Packaging, says using preflighting software has helped her company justify the costs associated with repairing design files. "Some customers are very invested in getting the files right," she says. "Others aren't sure they want to own the responsibility. In that case, our preflighting software is a major help, because we can offer a third-party report on the condition of the job when it entered the shop. The report indicates exactly what work needs to be done to the job before it can proceed through prepress, and it validates any additional cost applied."

Stone says her company's internal design group is responsible for preflighting incoming files, using either FlightCheck, or PreFlight Pro from Extensis. "The designers select the program they want to use. Often they prefer FlightCheck because it is the easier program to use, but Preflight Pro seems to support a wider range of applications—especially for PDF."

Green's prepress infrastructure is built around an Agfa Apogee PDF workflow that was implemented more than three years ago. In addition to its folding carton work, the company prints a high volume of technical manuals. "For security reasons, customers preferred not to supply us the original application files, but gave us PostScript instead. That PostScript was written from non-standard applications and was often very difficult to work with. So we did some training with our customers' editors and designers and established procedures for them to write their own PDFs. We still have a few issues, but we're getting much better results."

While most of Green's commercial work is handled in PDF format, Stone says its packaging work is just now in the process of migrating to a PDF workflow. "We have some struggles with PDF in packaging, mostly because of die-line issues. The die line used to design the art has to match the actual die perfectly, so that later, in step and repeat, the art snaps into the right place on the multiple-up print form."

"Also, packaging graphics are far more complicated, what with embossing and foils and overprints of spot colors. It's not as plug-n-play as the commercial work and we tend to still request the native Illustrator or Freehand file for insurance."

In any case, Vicki Stone, like her counterpart Mike Port at Seneca, believes that avoiding costly rework on incoming electronic files requires preventative measures. "It's really an educational process," she explains. "We spend time—a great deal of time—with our customers in seminars and telephone conferences to help them understand the process better."