CS4’s Preflight Limitations
Up until CS4, InDesign’s preflight feature was subpar at best. Luckily preflight in CS4 has been completely redesigned from the ground up. My friend James Wamser (he printed the InDesign Secrets posters) and I were talking and although we both agree this is a great feature, he shared a few issues that he has discovered with the new preflight. The first few are the observations that he has come across and I added a few of my own.
Four Color Text: It is true that you can set up a warning for registration applied, but you can not define a warning for your own rich black. This is a problem since many users will have their own custom rich black. If they inadvertently apply this to their body text, bad things could happen. Sometimes text that is imported into InDesign contains Cyan, Magenta and Yellow plates when it should only be 100% black (Word files are notorious for this).
Bleed/trim hazard: Another problem that can crop up is if you have a text frame in the bleed hazard zone, it will trip off the warning even if there is no text in the zone. The presence of the frame alone, will cause this to happen. If there is no stroke and fill, it still reports an error.
Profile Error reporting: On the bottom of the InDesign layout the error button with a green circle if everything is OK and a red circle is there is a problem. The issue here is that it does not show which profile is currently in use. Ideally there would a text field that mentioned which profile was currently in use.
Preflight profile sharing with Acrobat: It would be nice if you were able to share some aspects of your profiles with Acrobat. I realize that everything would not transfer over, but I would like a core set of rules that you could share with Acrobat.
Fonts not allowed rule: I would love a rule to flag any specific font. For example, I would like to flag any instance of Times or Times New Roman since it is InDesign’s default font.
Despite these few small issues, the new preflight is definitely a step in the right direction and hopefully Adobe will implement these changes in the future.
James was kind enough to include his own custom profile for everyone to download and use on their machine.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the InDesign CS4 prelight profile. While you are there don’t forget to check out Mr. Wamser’s quicktips for creating high quality PDFs.
Great post, Fritz.
I think the bottom line is that there’s still no substitute for intelligent workflows and careful preflight by a real human.
Live Preflight is a great new feature! I would add one other limitation, though.
I’m a slightly slower PC (dual-core, with 2 GB of RAM) and when I have a more advanced profile than the default that checks for say, images below a certain PPI, things can slow down to a CRAWL. Essentially, after every action (moving a frame, etc.), it does a check. When I have a document with a large number of images in it, the check can take upwards of 4 or 5 seconds each time.
The first time I experienced it, I thought my computer was crashing – it took me several minutes to realize it was the profile checking things after each minor change.
So, I now leave the default profile on and only switch over to more advanced ones at periodic times to check the profile. I still find it to be a useful feature, but it is somewhat diluted by the fact that I can’t leave it on all the time.
Sorry to disagree, but it is totally possible to be warned if you apply a rich black or other multiple ink color to text.
Under the setting for Text, check the option for “Minimum Type Size”.
Set the amount to something extremely high, like 200 points. This essentially says all text will be looked at.
Then, set the option underneath that for “Limit Text with Multiple Inks or White”.
This will flag all text that has anything other than a single ink applied.
Good point Sandee, but I would like a Preflight setting that flags all type below a given point size that contains 100% black ink and also contains inks in the Cyan, Magenta and / or Yellow plates.
For example, if you have red type ( 100% Magenta and 100% Yellow) that would be fine, but if any type (below a certain point size) contains 100% black ink and another ink, it most likely is a mistake.
James,
Why would the Red (100M, 100Y) be OK, but any Black plus another ink not OK?
In my experience, when you have text that contains 100% K and also contains additional inks, it most likely is done by mistake. Unless, of course it’s larger type that requires additional inks to get a rich black.
Sandee, does this make a little more sense?
Thanks James.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with you and Fritz.
While the current Preflight setting does avoid any text being set in more than one ink, there does need to be a way to specify the number and percentages of inks that are not allowed.
Your example of magenta and yellow inks being OK, but black not makes sense.
I’m just used to a world where you never color any text in anything but one color ink. But then again, I was designing coupons for Sunday newspaper supplements that had no possible control for registration.
@Brian: Live Preflight is a background/idle process, meaning it is designed to not interrupt or slow down your other work. So I’m curious to know more about what you mean when you say “things can slow down to a CRAWL”. I’m assuming you mean the Live Preflight update slows down on longer documents. That makes sense — longer documents equals more things to check.
InDesign itself should not be slowing down though because of Live Preflight. The instant you start doing something, Live Preflight will pause.
Also, in case you missed this, you can limit the page range that Live Preflight is set to check. By default, it checks the entire document. But if you only want it to check a specific page range, say the set of pages you are working on currently, you can enter that page range into the page range field at the bottom right corner of the Preflight panel. Using this technique should dramatically speed up the update time when using a complex profile.
Another limitation or problem we have found is with the “Non-Proportional Scaling” warning.
While it’s obvious why this warning is available, I would like to be able to specify a threshold. (no options on the setting. It’s either on or off).
I’m a pretty sloppy designer (and it may be an insult to designers everywhere to call myself one). I’m more of a prepress guy that can hunt and peck around when I need to design something.
I’m sure that there are many others like me who tend to resize objects by grabbing the frame and pulling it diagonally to resize it “almost-proportionally”. Granted, this is far from perfect but it’s often close enough that it doesn’t create a visual problem.
This warning is totally unforgiving. An object may be off proportionally by a thousandth of an inch, but ID CS4 still considers it disproportionate and flags it.
I disabled this check in the profile we provide our customers until Adobe puts in a configurable threshold.
Good article referenced here about how using the built-in preflight alongside third-party utilities makes sense.
@ Michael Ninness
Hi Michael. Sorry for the delayed response to your question.
By crawl I mean a realized pause between doing things. For example, when I click on and drag a text frame on a page, the system pauses for several sections prior to actually moving. Another is clicking into a text frame and then into a table. Once I double-clicked to enter it, it would pause for a noticable amount of time before reacting.
I wasn’t aware that it was a background process that was supposed to stop when an action occured – for some reason, it doesn’t stop quickly enough for me.
Good tip on the page range – I wasn’t aware of that. Taht, and switching between preflight profiles has done the trick for me.