InReview: InPreflight Pro 3

Whenever I walk onto a plane, I always take a quick glance inside the cockpit before I head toward my seat. Invariably I see the pilots doing their preflight checks of equipment and procedures. I breathe a little easier knowing all the details have been checked. The same principle holds true for your InDesign documents: Just as you wouldn’t want to fly on a plane that hadn’t been inspected, you wouldn’t want to package, export, or print an InDesign file with missing fonts, unlinked images, or overset text. Preflighting your documents is an essential step in proofing your documents to avoid these technical errors.

Preflight in InDesign

Preflight capabilities have long been built into InDesign. Version 1 shipped with a Packaging command (File > Package) that warns of any missing fonts, links, or images (Figure 1). InDesign CS4 shipped with a Preflight panel offering real-time preflighting of your documents (Figure 2).

The Live Preflight capabilities allow you to immediately identify and correct errors during the design phase of your project instead of waiting until the document is ready for print. You can create, share, load, and embed different Preflight Profiles that check against a multitude of criteria within your documents, such as missing fonts, prohibited color spaces, non-proportional type scaling, or blank pages. See Issue #61 of InDesign Magazine for

a step-by-step tutorial on using InDesign’s built-in preflighting features. While they are very useful, InDesign’s Package and Preflight features can be cumbersome to work with. For example, unless you choose Enable Preflight for All Documents from the panel menu, you need to turn on preflighting every time you open a document. Actually, this is an intentional feature, not a bug as Live Preflight has the potential to slow InDesign significantly, especially when working on highly complex documents on older systems. Zevrix Solutions’ InPreflight Pro offers an alternative for preflight, packaging, and even delivery, all in one application.

InPreflight Pro 3 Is Really Version 1

Despite the 3 in its name, InPreflight Pro 3 is actually a new application. The previous version, InPreflight Pro 2, was stagnant for a few years after it could no longer be updated due to its old codebase. The old version was also incompatible with Big Sur, and it even required some extra effort to run on Catalina. The new version is, obviously, compatible with all recent macOS systems and is ready for further updates and improvements without limitations. The only thing recycled from the old version (besides the name) are some UI elements and a few lines of code here and there.

First Steps

Once installed (the program can be installed for multiple versions of InDesign), you launch InPreflight Pro from the Zevrix menu that is added to InDesign. You can also launch InPreflight Pro like any other application from the Finder or Dock (though the program is nested within the Adobe InDesign > Plug-Ins > Zevrix folder and not in the top level Applications folder). The first thing you’ll want to do after launching InPreflight Pro is create a Preflight Preset. Presets allow you to determine which conditions are checked in your document and can be tailored to the kinds of documents you produce, your workflow, and your printing process. Keep in mind that Preflight warnings don’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with your document. For instance, InDesign’s Package command displays a warning for any document containing RGB images. I and many others feel this is a disservice, as not only are RGB images just fine for any document meant for the web, but RGB images, with their wider color gamut, are the better format for archiving. If you’re sending your job to a printer, let InDesign handle the CMYK conversion when exporting to PDF (see Why You Should Import RGB Images Into InDesign and Convert to CMYK On Export). Click the Preflight Presets button or choose File > Preflight Presets to access the Presets dialog box. Your Presets are listed on the left, which is where you add or delete them. From the gear icon you can share Presets using the Export/Import commands. Presets are created based on the attributes of three criteria: Fonts, Colors, and Links.

Fonts

Under the Fonts category you can choose up to five criteria to flag: Name, Type, Status, Postscript Name, and Location (Figure 3). You can also add multiple rules, allowing for complex search criteria.

Colors

Use the Colors category to check for color model (spot or process) or color space (RGB, CMYK, Lab, or HSB) attributes, or even to check for unused colors (Figure 4).

Links

The Links category allows you to choose from six attributes to check, including Name, Kind, Status, Color Mode, ICC Profile, and Path (Figure 5). As with Fonts, you can combine them to build complex rules.

The lower half of the Links category allows for preflighting based on effective resolution (for both Color/Grayscale and Monochrome images, separately), with thresholds to set both a minimum and maximum pixel density. You can also set thresholds for file size, as well as check for fonts in EPS and Illustrator files. Finally, you can check for images that are scaled non-proportionally or that are non-printing. Note that whereas InDesign’s Preflight will report on any missing link, InPreflight Pro’s Links section is dedicated to graphic links only. It does not report on links to text documents or InCopy stories. Nor does it report on links that are on Parent pages or are on the pasteboard. This is in keeping with the previous version of InPreflight Pro, but it is something the developer plans to address in future updates.

Preflight

With your Preflight Presets created, it’s time to start checking your documents. With a document open in InDesign, click the Preflight button at the top of the InPreflight Pro window, or choose File > Preflight Active Document. The results of the preflight will appear in the InPreflight Pro application window, which is separated into multiple sections by adjustable dividers (Figure 6).

The Document section (top left) reports the Preflight Status (errors or no errors) as well as basic information about your InDesign document. The other sections of the window coincide with the three Preflight categories, reporting the results of your Fonts and Colors along the top, and Links on the bottom. InPreflight Pro flags files that satisfy any of the preflight preset conditions. For example, if you specify the conditions Kind Contains JPEG and Resolution < 300 dpi, any link whose kind is a JPEG will be flagged, as well as any file whose resolution is less than 300 dpi. But whereas InDesign’s Preflight Panel warns only of matched criteria in your document, InPreflight Pro lists all Fonts, Colors, and Links of your document in the corresponding sections of its window. Flagged results that match your preflight criteria will be highlighted in red and indicated with a warning icon. So, you get a much more comprehensive overview than you do with InDesign’s built-in preflighting. The Links section is especially detailed. Think of it as a cross between InDesign’s Links panel and Adobe Bridge. It even shows fonts and spot colors in Illustrator files, as well as duotone colors in Photoshop files. To the right of the Links section is a preview window showing an image of the link, with an area beneath with two tabs for Info and Metadata. The Info tab shows basic info about the link on your computer (Name, Path, Modification Date), with handy buttons to open the link, reveal the link in the Finder, or show the link in the InDesign document. As you might expect, the Metadata tab is where you’ll find the detailed metadata information cameras often embedded in images (Figure 7).

Reports

As with InDesign’s Preflight panel, InPreflight Pro can generate a report of its findings in either text or PDF form. However, InPreflight Pro’s reports can also be heavily customized using the Preflight Report Setup window (Figure 8).

You can sort each table by any column, adjust the column widths and sorting order, and resize the window. The resulting report will look exactly like you see it on screen. Once you’re satisfied with the report’s appearance, you can bypass this step and print or save reports as PDFs directly via the respective buttons in the toolbar.

Packaging

If preflighting InDesign documents were all that InPreflight Pro did, it would be worthy of consideration. But InPreflight Pro also handles packaging of documents. It can even batch-package multiple documents—something you normally can’t do with InDesign alone. One workaround for making InDesign package multiple files together is to add those files to an InDesign book, and then use the Package command in the Book panel. Just be very careful to not update page numbers or synchronize styles and swatches unless you want to. Click the Package button in the toolbar to access the Advanced Packaging options (Figure 9). You can package a single document or add multiple documents using the + and – buttons or by dragging them into the window from the Finder. There’s also an option to add arbitrary files and folders to be included with your packaged InDesign jobs.

InPreflight Pro gives you all the options InDesign does when packaging files (whether to create an IDML, a PDF, or report, and so on), along with some helpful extras, such as placing linked files in the same (top-level) folder as the InDesign document. This option ensures that links will always be instantly found when the packaged folder is forwarded to other users or stored for archiving purposes.  Another handy option is unified packaging, which packages all documents into a single folder with joint fonts and links folders. This mode is especially useful for InDesign documents that share the same placed images and fonts: You only package each link or font once instead of packaging them multiple times for each document. Unified packaging can save significant amounts of disk space and time when archiving. When packaging multiple documents, InPreflight Pro must preflight them first. After you preflight a batch of InDesign files, the Document section of the preflight window displays a menu that lists the preflighted document names. Click a specific document to view the preflight results for it. A red dot next to the document name indicates that preflight errors were found (Figure 10).

Delivery

Finally, InPreflight Pro can use the Zevrix products Deliver and Deliver Express to automatically send packaged jobs locally and over the internet. All delivery options are specified in those apps. InPreflight Pro then passes packaged jobs to the delivery apps and sends those files to the destination selected in InPreflight Pro.

Final Thoughts

Almost every InDesign workflow should include some kind of preflighting. At a minimum, you should be preflighting your documents before sending them to your print service provider or archiving them. InDesign handles preflighting quite well through its own Preflight panel, but its packaging options are limited and neither feature has been updated in many years. InPreflight Pro adds another option to your preflighting arsenal. While it offers some unique features over InDesign’s preflighting, it’s still missing other crucial preflighting features, such as text-link checks (text documents, InCopy stories) and document checks (page size, number of pages, blank pages, overset text, and so on). Zevrix promises these options are coming in future updates, so there’s good reason to believe InPreflight Pro will soon rival (or surpass) InDesign in all preflight capabilities. Where InPreflight Pro really shines is in its packaging capabilities. Being able to batch-­process packaging is a huge time saver, while its unified packaging option is a huge space saver. There’s little reason to believe Adobe will ever add these options to InDesign, so the packaging features alone may be reason enough to make InPreflight Pro a regular part of your design lineup.

• InPreflight Pro 3
• Zevrix Solutions
• $99.95
• macOS 10.12 and later
• Rating: 3.5 stars

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