Need suggestions on Preflight Routine with PitStop Pro 12

[RodrigoRocha]

Hello there!

We are an Offset print industry with an wide range of customers, by that we receive many sorts of files to print, and literally sometimes we need to do some hat tricks to crack down errors on files before it reaches our printers.

By that, we are considering on adopting a preflight routine on every file, and I really would like to know if you guys have Suggestions on which points should we check with PitStop Pro 12.
Here we work with Prinect, PDF Flow and a TopSetter 74.

As you can probably notice, I'm not an expert at the subject, so if someone need more data, please let me know!

Thank you for the support!

 

[Stephen Marsh]

PitStop ships with default sets which are pretty good. To start, look at a PDF/X standard. The downside is that there is a good chance that you are not being sent PDF/X files and you may receive errors/warnings that are PDF/X specific. I hope that you do request PDF/X files though (either X-1a, X-3 or X-4).

I am not sure if you are just looking to preflight – or preflight+fix, which are two different things.

The next place I would look is a Ghent Work Group (GWG) preflight profile. PitStop has those too, or you can download them from here:

Application Settings - Ghent Workgroup

PitStop also has good “generic” preflight profiles too.

Depending on your needs, you may wish to modify preflight profiles, adding or removing checks and fixes, or changing warnings to errors or vice versa.


Stephen Marsh

 

[abc]

Well it's funny you should post this. I'm just about to plan a webinar on this very topic.

If you have PitStop 12 you should have been invited to participate in an online survey, the reward for which is an invitation to a series of webinars we have been running throughout the year.

If you send me an email I will make sure you get a link for it. If you've already filled it out then you'll automatically get an invitation.

 

[rich apollo]

Some ideas:

Set all white elements to knockout
Check that all fonts are properly embedded
You could check for, and convert RGB elements
Items within 1/16 inch of trim box that don't bleed
Type too close to trim box
If going out to a black and white printer, convert everything to grayscale
Look for, and convert or remove, anything in registration color
Check for acceptable image resolution
Check for hairline strokes
Check for elements that exceed your acceptable total ink limit
Check for type that is too small

These are just a few ideas. All of these are easy to set up in PitStop.

 

[motormount]

I thought that both qualify and prepare engines in prinect are doing all the checks-and fixes- above.

And like Stephen said,you can download some standard from ghent and customize it either in prinect or pitstop!

I'm not sure-even though i'm using it - but i think that prinect does all the checks and fixes with pitstop or a mixture of pitstop and it's own tools!

 

[RodrigoRocha]

Great! Many answers!

Stephen, many of our files comes on PDF X1/A, but not all of them. About GWG, GREAT! I'll take a look on it today. About the Correcting, as we never had an experience with PitStop PRO, I don't know how this auto-fixes works, so firstly I would consider just finding the problems, and correct them manually.

abc, we don't have PitStop yet. Last year we've made a trial with pitstop server + switch, focused mainly at the switch automations, and not on the pre-flight. By that time, we found out that our jobs were so different from each other that we would not benefit that much from Switch. But now we are considering on affording just PitStop Pro, or maybe server. Even if I don't have the software, may I still watch your webinar? Thank you!

rich apollo, thanks for the ideas, that is exactly what I'm looking for. For color conversion we use GMG, so I think conversion on RGB or CMYK to CMYK, would not be done on PitStop right?

motormount, As short as I understood, Prinect comes with PitStop or PDFToolbox, but our version is a little old and it's cheaper to buy and keep updated PitStop than Prinect, I think. Do you agree?

GUYS THANK YOU! It may be a silly question for you, but for me all the answers are being great.

Hope to hear more soon!

 

[motormount]

Prinect does a lot more than normalizing pdf's,we have a three years-or is it four- version and plans of updating are little more possible than winning the lottary,but it still does the job!

But updating prinect just for handling pdf's is overkill,i think myself too that pitstop is more than enough!

 

[chevalier]

Prinect does a lot more than normalizing pdf's,we have a three years-or is it four- version and plans of updating are little more possible than winning the lottary,but it still does the job!

But updating prinect just for handling pdf's is overkill,i think myself too that pitstop is more than enough!

I'm a few generations removed from Prinect at this point so the validity of this info is questionable. With v4.5 (I think) they dropped licensing the pitstop backend and recreated/reverse-engineered their own solution including Acrobat plugins which will (at least it would back then) accept pitstop action lists.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Great! Many answers!

Stephen, many of our files comes on PDF X1/A, but not all of them. About GWG, GREAT! I'll take a look on it today. About the Correcting, as we never had an experience with PitStop PRO, I don't know how this auto-fixes works, so firstly I would consider just finding the problems, and correct them manually.

Remember that Acrobat Pro Preflights and PitStop Pro Preflights generally have all of the basics contained in standard profiles (white overprint, hairlines in more than one colour, unembedded fonts, too much total ink, resolution of images etc), and that GWG profiles come standard with PitStop Pro so you may not need to download any from the GWG site. It is easy enough to change, add or remove different preflight checks and fixes.

I would let the preflight fix things unless you are going to reject the job, however you should produce an annotated report so that you can see what the problem was. There are things which can be flagged by preflight that may or may not be a serious issue, which is why you can change a default profile to notify instead of error etc.


Stephen Marsh