PREPRESS OPERATIONS -- Grounding Your Clients in Preflight

"Preflighting is not an exact science," the premedia manager asserts. "There are so many parameters that can be set too strict, so nothing gets through, or too loose, so bad things can get through to the plate. You need to find a happy medium."

At Brown Printing, files with RGB images or missing fonts are rejected from the workflow, but those with low-resolution images, especially something like a small logo, may be allowed to pass, Borhauer explains. "In that case, we would ask the customer to come online to view the file and 'accept' or 'decline' it. We can capture the acceptance or decline using an XML tag and metadata, which also logs the date and person's identity."