Updated Free Live Preflight Profiles for CS4 and CS5
One of the biggest productivity features in the last couple versions of InDesign has been Live Preflight. We’ve covered the basics of it here and here. But the greatest problem in using it for print workflows has been knowing what preflight rules to include.
Ideally, you would get this information from your printer, but this isn’t always convenient or possible. David pointed out some time ago that there is an organization which provides free Live Preflight profiles for different segments of the graphics industry. This is VIGC (the Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication). This Belgian organization is affiliated with the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG)?a worldwide organization of experts which has developed profiles for creating and preflighting PDFs.
VIGC Logo
In July 2010, they released version 2 of their extremely useful preflight profiles which now work with InDesign CS4 and CS5. What’s new? All the profiles have been updated based on user feedback, and include the seven new checks available in Adobe InDesign CS5. For example, you can now check for files that differ in size and orientation, unresolved caption variables, and several kinds of interactive elements, among other rules.
VIGC Profile Loaded
Previously they provided 13 profiles for different segments of the graphics industry. They have now been expanded to 18, adding five for packaging based on new GWG specifications. You can either use them as they are, or modify them for your own print workflows.
The already excellent tutorials that come with the download have been revised and expanded, and they are a great way to learn to use preflight profiles for Live Preflight.
VIGC Tutorial
To help you pick which profile to use, you can gather information from the README PDF and two Excel tables that show all the rules included in each of the 18 profiles. A How To Guide gives you the steps to try out the profiles.
VIGC ReadMe
There’s nothing quite like this resource, and they’re free for you to use or modify!
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Wow … that’s an incredible resource! Thank you Steve!
That?s funny, the day before Steve post this, I did a presentation on InDesign Preflight to our InDesign Meeting here in Montreal and mention the exact same link & resources from VIGC. Even if you will not use their profiles, the tutorials, read-me & Excel files are all worth it.
Why not just use FlightCheck and get full Adobe Creative Suite DTP preflighting / packaging with many other industry file formats supported in one package? (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat – all versions + QuarkXPress, Publisher, PDF, EPS, JPG, etc)
We also have a preflight profiles section called Ground Controls, which has many popular pre-sets to start with or use out-of-the-box.
Friendly Regards,
David Dilling
Markzware
(Makers of FlightCheck)
Speaking as the one that did more or less the hard work on these profiles, thanks for the article and compliments. Making printable desings is all about good communication and preparation. If our (VIGC) Live Preflight Profiles can help with that and benefit the industry, we’re more than pleased to put the effort into this work, and keep on doing this in the future. Thanks again for the appreciation and support for our work.
I find it annoying that the preflight check runs every 10 seconds or so (on CS5 here). On big documents this can really hammer the performance.
It seems a shame to turn off such a useful feature when there could easily be an option to set the preflight check to happen every few minutes and/or upon saving your document.
FYI, we looked at our statistics yesterday and the VIGC Live Preflight Profiles for Adobe InDesign have been downloaded by people from more than 60 different countries! Thanks to InDesignSecrets.com…
Also interesting are the comments we got. Many of the people who downloaded them are designers. And their reaction: “Why don’t our printers tell us that this exists??? This is something we really want!” Which is in contrast to what we hear from printers, who are always complaingin that designers don’t deliver them correct files. Well printers, here’s a free tool, so don’t complain, but educate your customers!
We’re happy to publicize such an excellent and FREE product! Thank you, VIGC!
I don’t think that David Dilling should be using this post to push the commercial product he markets. Here in the UK it is a legal requirement to state that it is an advertisement.
Peter, occasional posts from members of the InDesign community who suggest their own product as a legitimate solution to a problem posed in the article is generally fine with us, and we don’t consider it advertising. We do quietly remove comments that breach that trust.
Where do I install these from??? There is no link!?!
Hi Mavi- There was a link to the VIGC in the article, but it was broken. Sorry about that. Fixed now.