Making Acrobat Act Like Flightcheck
Here is areally good tip inspired by a forum discussion on Print Planet. Suppose you are sick to death with the unreliable reports Markzware’s Flightcheck has been giving for the past few releases. Furthermore, you have discovered the pre-flight capabilities in Adobe Acrobat Professional (since Version 6.) You might even have written your own preflight profiles.
Now it is also assumed that your production shop doesn’t need a full-fledged pre-flight package like Enfocus Pitstop. But you do want something a little more powerful than Acrobat—so you don’t have to pay a designer by the hour to open and check files that have nothing wrong. That’s where the “batch processing” capabilities of Acrobat Professional come in.
Most Adobe geeks have been utilizing batch processing since Photoshop picked it up in Version 6 (e.g., for converting folders full of TIFF files to JPEG.) If you use a “Hot Folder” for Distiller, then you are essentially running a batch-processing applet for Distiller. This is a comparatively simple action for your Preflight Engine.
In Acrobat Professional, select the “Advanced—Batch Processing…” menu. You will get a dialogue box with a list of previously created Sequences (it is a pity Adobe didn’t already create this sequence.) Click the “New Sequence…” button to build your Preflight Engine.
The “Edit Batch Sequence” dialogue box will pop up. Select the “Preflight—Preflight” command. Be sure to highlight the “Preflight” command and click the “Edit…” button to access your Preflight Profile (e.g., “List images below 300 ppi” or “List non CMYK objects.” If you want a profile that does both, you will have to create it.) Set up the Success and Error parameters so that they save the checked files (along with their reports) to their respective folders. Also click the option to present a summary of all failed documents. Save your Parameters and Okay the Sequence.
Back at the “Edit Batch Sequence” dialogue box, choose your selected folder (your designated “Hot Folder,” where you will put the files to be preflighted.) Then choose an output folder (it is preferable to create a separate output folder, just to keep things tidy.) Leave your “Source File Options…” at their default so that Acrobat will even check non-PDF image files! And change the “Output Options…” at your discretion.
After you click “Ok,” you will be back to the Batch Processing dialogue box. This is where you still need a trained ape to press the “Run Sequence” button.
