There’s a lot of prep work to be done before you can get your print job off the ground.

By Jean-Marie Hershey

Going Soft

Some preflighting software can reliably flag file errors by “soft-interpreting” the file, similar to the way a RIP does. According to Ranasinha, this is the only way deeper file errors can be weeded out. “Say the fonts are there but the data is bad. Lesser preflighting tools will ‘see’ that fonts are in the file, but won’t know that one is corrupted. Images may be seen as the correct resolution and/or color space, but might not open when they’re RIPped. Ink coverage is another example. If you print 330 percent max on your press, and some funky Photoshop file has been made with 350 percent total coverage, there is no way to extract that information just by looking at file header information.