Suggestions on preflight for problem documents (legal repro)

[bcr]

I'd be grateful for any recommendations on use of preflight to help with this scenario:

Most of our work is legal reprographics. Printing binders with tabs full of documents from external lawyers.

Often CWS will stop printing halfway through a job because it found an error in the document.

These errors are usually due to:

- scanned document contains errors in the OCR - often in a foreign language, especially Cyrillic.

- document is a scan and lawyers have added a text header over it.

- document is a weird size scan and lawyers have messed with the size of the image extending beyond the page.

Currently all I do with preflight for all documents is to scale the page to A4, before loading into total flow prep.

With some problem documents today I've used preflight to convert the page contents to a CMYK image. And I was wondering whether anyone has any ideas on how to use preflight to avoid these problems without adding on excessive processing time.

Changing the behaviour of lawyers submitting these documents is not an option btw. We have no control over that.

 

[rcreveli]

You can create an Action in Pitstop pro with a group of actions nested in it. Click on your "Master Action" and it will run a preflight on the file for your most common errors.

 

[abc]

So let's talk about how to resolve the errors you raised.

- scanned document contains errors in the OCR - often in a foreign language, especially Cyrillic.
What's the solution, just strip out the OCR as you want to just print the image, so do you need to retain the OCR text?
If so what are the OCR errors?

- document is a scan and lawyers have added a text header over it.
Not sure why this should fail, I guess it might be added as an annotation or a form in which case these can be flattened so they work.

- document is a weird size scan and lawyers have messed with the size of the image extending beyond the page.
so what's the solution here, fit to a page size or crop the image so it is within the boundaries of the page.

If you know how you want to resolve the issues, you can design a preflight profile to achieve that. Not just warn/error on them.

 

[ReproElectroProspero]

quick and dirty solution from an inplant that has faced similar issues and did not have the budget for pitstop:

build your printable pdf, with all the wonky ocr and size issues.
file -> print to PDF, with auto-fit to page selected on the page size you want everything to be.
get new PDF with all pages resized correctly.
print this PDF and if it still throws issues, go to PDF properties and "Print As Image".

Has its drawbacks but always works in a pinch for us.

 

[bcr]

So let's talk about how to resolve the errors you raised.

- scanned document contains errors in the OCR - often in a foreign language, especially Cyrillic.
What's the solution, just strip out the OCR as you want to just print the image, so do you need to retain the OCR text?
If so what are the OCR errors?

- document is a scan and lawyers have added a text header over it.
Not sure why this should fail, I guess it might be added as an annotation or a form in which case these can be flattened so they work.

- document is a weird size scan and lawyers have messed with the size of the image extending beyond the page.
so what's the solution here, fit to a page size or crop the image so it is within the boundaries of the page.

If you know how you want to resolve the issues, you can design a preflight profile to achieve that. Not just warn/error on them.

Thanks for your response.
I'm not always entirely clear on what the problem is as the files just crap out on me half way through printing and I get a vague error message from CWS.

Almost always though the files have one or more of the issues above.

Re OCR - I believe the issue is when OCR has been applied to a scanned document but in such a way that it makes the text editable, i.e. not as a separate OCR layer.
Especially when it's a scan of foreign languages, this has a tendency to throw up all kinds of problems which I guess are font related.

Solution for problem docs has generally been to re-print them as image or convert to CMYK image through preflight. But I'm wondering whether there is a preflight tool I could use to fix these types of issues without having to first convert everything to image - when dealing with 1000s of pages that adds a lot of processing time.

Re. Page sizes, I'll try adding a crop rule on top of the 'scale to a4'. rule I'm already doing

 

[bcr]

quick and dirty solution from an inplant that has faced similar issues and did not have the budget for pitstop:

build your printable pdf, with all the wonky ocr and size issues.
file -> print to PDF, with auto-fit to page selected on the page size you want everything to be.
get new PDF with all pages resized correctly.
print this PDF and if it still throws issues, go to PDF properties and "Print As Image".

Has its drawbacks but always works in a pinch for us.

Thank you - that's pretty much what I do when a file won't cooperate. I'm just wondering if I can use preflight to avoid files crapping out on me mid print, but without converting everything to image up front.

Also - I once had a document that nothing would work on.. In the end using the Microsoft Print to PDF driver was the only thing that fixed it.

It's quite frustrating being halfway through a 5,000 page binder when suddenly it stops printing without warning..

 

[abc]

What preflight software do you have?
Acrobat, PitStop, Callas or something else?

 

[bcr]

What preflight software do you have?
Acrobat, PitStop, Callas or something else?

Acrobat Pro