Preflight: Will Your File Fly

There’s no denying that preflight software has been a godsend for printers and prepress professionals everywhere since the concept was introduced and popularized more than a decade ago. Preflighting is the process by which prepress identifies and corrects missing items and errors in customer files before they become bigger and more costly problems further downstream in the printing process. As the very first stage in a prepress workflow, preflighting generally is performed on the desktop file or on the file right out of the design application to make sure the file will RIP the way it needs to, i.e., will produce a correctly printed job.