Thank you for your comments on the document (which is available again above). I understand your reasons to get familiar with the document, by cruising around within InDesign, but from a practical point of view, there are tools to assist for this.

I would want to know if the document can be trusted before I put my energy in working with it. To stay in your analogy; it is great to explore the electric controls and the likes, but before you enter the room in a house you just want to make sure you don’t fall through the floor, the roof will come down or that you get electrocuted when you switch on the lights…

I believe that almost all the checks on your list work even better AFTER preflighting the foundations of the document.

Many we know use electronic preflight methods before opening and editing someone else’s work, in prepress and in design/layout – I think that should be made clear.

It looks like Arnold may have removed that Word doc; the URL no longer works.

I appreciate your post and I have read your Word document.

I think you have misunderstood the reason that I posted this Pre-Work Check.

First, the check has nothing to do with output. It is not for the press or service provider who needs to open and output a file.

While FlightCheck is able to handle some of the issues I mentioned, it really is not the right application for what I am trying to accomplish.

First, you have to understand that I posted my list for those who are going to continue to work on someone else’s work — work that they are not familiar with.

The purpose of my list is to help someone familiarize themselves with the project. My suggestion for scrolling through the pages panel has less to do with counting the number of pages than it does with becoming comfortable with the document.

In fact, the very fact that FlightCheck “will not only reveal the number of pages in seconds” makes FlightCheck the wrong application to use.

I don’t want people to speed through the pages, styles, colors, fonts, and images in a document.

My Pre-Work Check is to slow them down so they understand how the document was created.

Next, in your Word document you said “you want to see what happens when an image is modified, but with a missing link the image is just not there.”

That’s not true. There is not a blank space in the frame. There is a proxy image that gives an excellent idea of what the designer or author intended.

Finally, the trouble with your scenario to use FlightCheck is that it doesn’t give the new creator for the document a chance to really navigate around the file.

FlightCheck is excellent for output providers and should actually be done at several steps in the document creation process. But my list is a better idea than FlightCheck.

The analogy I like is the one for someone who might own a home. FlightCheck is an excellent process to go through if you are going to put your house on the market and want to know if there will be any issues when people come to look.

FlightCheck is a excellent process to go through before you go to contract on the sale of a house.

But a Pre-Work Check is the process you want to go through when you rent a house for the summer and want to know where the electric controls are, how to turn on the TV, is there a WiFi system, what’s the password for the system, etc.