Library: Creative Design

Identify and fix print errors with easy-to-use preflight tools

The appearance of your printed documents is as important as meeting your deadlines and staying within your budget. It’s hard work to make these elements align, but you can make the job a lot easier if you add preflighting to your production workflow. Acrobat Professional makes it easy to do with its preflight tools.

Preflight inspection
Some issues preflighting identifies are color, fonts, transparency, image resolution, and PDF version compatibility. Preflighting your PDFs checks the file against a set of userdefined values called preflight profiles. Before you run a preflight check or create a PDF for print, you should:
• Use settings provided by your print service provider, or use the predefined settings of the application that the PDF was created in (for example, InDesign or Illustrator).
• Use CMYK or DeviceN color space in four color process jobs (use DeviceN when duotones, tritons, or quadtones are involved).
• Embed all fonts from within the originating application to eliminate font substitution.

Quality control
Preflighting should occur after the design process is complete, but prior to sending your job files to the printer. The preflight feature in ...