Product Reviews

For the uninitiated, preflighting is the process of checking electronic documents for potential problems which might prevent or complicate their output. Today, almost every design and page layout package has its own preflighting and job collection feature. FlightCheck 5 aims to retain its usefulness by supporting more native file formats and introducing a second tier of report warnings, though the core program is largely unchanged.

The biggest upgraded feature in this new release, however, is it now runs natively in Mac OS X, as well as in Classic. This puts FlightCheck 5 ahead of its only direct rival, PreFlight Pro from Extensis, which still runs exclusively in Classic.

The program interface is virtually unchanged. This is good news for people who hate change, but disappointing if you had hoped Markzware was going to tidy up some of those big windows with their vast areas of empty space. There have been light enhancements, though - you can now re-sort report lists by clicking on column headings, for example.

In addition to being able to analyse native QuarkXPress, InDesign, PDF, PostScript, Photoshop, Illustrator, FrameMaker, PageMaker and Multi-Ad Creator documents, FlightCheck 5 can preflight Word and PowerPoint files too - an impressive line-up. QuarkXPress 6 format is supported, albeit not in Web Layout mode, and Markzware's newly developed PDF model appears to work fine with version 1.5 PDFs created by Acrobat 6 and InDesign CS. Unfortunately, it can't read Adobe Creative Suite formats themselves. We also noticed that support for CorelDraw format has peaked at version 9. More positively, the program adds support for OpenType fonts.

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In common with most other modern preflighters, FlightCheck 5 now lets you set any item in the Ground Controls to return an intermediate 'warning' instead of the usual full-on 'error'. Issues which are reported with a 'warning' are highlighted in the report windows in blue with an exclamation mark. This ensures issues such as the existence and location of rotated page objects are merely indicated rather than reported as an 'error'.

However, the Ground Controls are still biased in their reporting. For example, you can flag a warning if a document has an embedded ICC profile, but the program won't warn you if a document doesn't have a profile. You can't, therefore, rely upon FlightCheck to keep track of a colour-managed workflow.

The upgrade introduces a new feature called Flight Plans. These are overall program settings which are geared up for specific types of preflighting work. In practice, all they seem to do is add or remove command buttons from a Flight Plan toolbar, and maintain their own collection of Ground Controls. Markzware includes a general purpose Flight Plan (without which the program won't work) and one for PDFs which includes Ground Control presets for PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3. There are no others, nor can you create your own. Unless Markzware makes some more Flight Controls available, we really can't see the point of them.

In other respects, FlightCheck 5 isn't everything we expected or hoped for. The previous version was AppleScriptable; this one isn't. You used to be able to call up a window showing the layout of a QuarkXPress file, complete with click-through page objects; this has been replaced by a Page Geometry window for all file formats but which offers no click-throughs. You used to be able to point FlightCheck at a folder to locate broken file links; now you have to select the files one by one. FlightCheck 5 does not support Suitcase. And so it goes on.

Until some of these matters have been addressed, it's difficult to find a compelling reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need to run it under Mac OS X. Yet at a time when users are being signed up to expensive workflow solutions and subscription-based online services, FlightCheck 5 is virtually the only standalone preflighter left.