A new independent research study conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting has documented that InDesign CS4 Live Preflight and other CS4 features can increase your productivity, efficiency, and return on investment. Commissioned by Adobe, the report documents routine operations in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 that can be accomplished more quickly than in previous versions. For InDesign CS4, the features highlighted were Live Preflight and Smart Guides.
Rufus Deuchler profiled and summarized the results of the benchmark study in his Adobe blog. You can download the report for design professionals from the Adobe website.
In this blog entry, I’ll explain why the InDesign CS4 Live Preflight feature saves you time and makes you more productive. In my next posting, I’ll share some tips and tricks to use the feature most effectively.
In previous versions of InDesign, you can choose File > Preflight open to open the Preflight dialog. You can do some low-level preflighting, like displaying the fonts and graphics used, and fix some production problems. However, there are limits in terms of what you can check for, and the process can’t be customized. Most importantly, it can’t lead you to the problems that need to be fixed, and it doesn’t tell a less experienced user what to do to correct a problem. It is a static and manual process which typically happened at the end of production, if at all.
Live Preflight, by contrast, totally redefines the preflighting process. It’s been moved from a dialog box to the new Preflight panel. By default, the feature now runs continuously in the background, and it alerts you to problems in real time. Plus, it’s totally customizable. The Pfeiffer benchmark report concluded that “locating and fixing document errors with Live Preflight was twice as fast in our tests as compared to the preflight functionality in previous releases.” The chart below, included in the report, shows the time to fix errors in CS4 (yellow) as compared with CS3 (gray)?the shorter bars indicate faster performance.
Live Preflight in InDesign CS4 is turned on by default. A red or green dot appears at the bottom of the document window, along with a message of the number of errors detected. By default, Live Preflight uses the [Basic] profile which only finds certain basic problems?specifically, missing and modified graphics, missing fonts, and overset text. To have it check for other potential problems, you’ll need to create your own preflight profile, or acquire one from your printer.
Double-clicking on the message area at the bottom of your document window opens the Preflight panel (or choose Window > Output > Preflight). In the Preflight panel (shown below), error messages are displayed, based on the current preflight profile being used. If you click the disclosure triangles on the left, all the errors are displayed. If you click on an error the Info section at the bottom explains the error, and (for the less sophisticated user) explains what can be done to fix the error. To the right of an error a link appears. Clicking on the link jumps you to the error.
Live Preflight acts dynamically and continuously: When you fix an error, the problem drops off the list! This makes it a quick and effective way to detect production problems that will slow down getting your work done successfully. The key is how you set up the preflight profile itself: We’ll cover that in the next episode.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on March 24, 2009
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