PREFLIGHTING -- Getting a Fix on Files

BY MARK SMITH

Like digital cockroaches, file errors have threatened to infest electronic prepress operations since the first job was sent to a RIP. Problems caused by missing fonts or photos, RGB colors, improper transformations, etc., persist despite the industry's best efforts to eradicate them.

What makes the situation so frustrating is that there's a ready solution for eliminating these bugs—just get clients to prepare their print files correctly—and processing bottlenecks will become extinct. Given that the digital revolution is more than a decade old and receiving bad files still is a top industry complaint, that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. Rather than fading away, the problem is becoming more acute. With the move to all-digital workflows, having clean files becomes a must.