InDesign CS4: A Second Look - Live Preflight

[Tech]

While I appreciate the new function, ease of use and find it very responsive, I have to wonder if any designer will ever bother using it. Designer never care about these things before and most never will because majority still don't see this as part of their responsibility.

I'm concluding Adobe added live preflight to benefit downstream workflow instead. It's an additional and slim down version of Acrobat's robust preflight features.

[rbailleu]

I disagree partially. I see your point but our graphic designers like the feature. it lets them know before it hits the ctp. of course one of them is the plate person so it is more important to her.
they also send work to the digital press.

[almaink]

IMO this is complete crap. If you don't know how to design, or use the software hire a professional. So sick of software companies taking away work from pros with these type of easy buttons. It's not like they are teaching theory here. It's hard enough to earn a living as it is, without being thrown under the bus by making it easier for amateurs to do their own printing. It's gotten to the point where soon every small print shop in America will close because of this type thing. Why pay for something you can do at home on your PC for free? Most of the new features in both CS3 and CS4 fall under this category.

[Tech]

IMO this is complete crap. If you don't know how to design, or use the software hire a professional. So sick of software companies taking away work from pros with these type of easy buttons. It's not like they are teaching theory here. It's hard enough to earn a living as it is, without being thrown under the bus by making it easier for amateurs to do their own printing. It's gotten to the point where soon every small print shop in America will close because of this type thing. Why pay for something you can do at home on your PC for free? Most of the new features in both CS3 and CS4 fall under this category.

I don't think Adobe intended to have live preflight as "be all end all" tool for designers nor meant to kill off pro level work. I just dislike the thought they are pitching this function to designers as if though it will save them from design mistakes or bad layout creation. Live Preflight is a step up from CS3 version but still a mini-version of what Acrobat Prof does and certainly far behind PitStop plugin.

[toronar]

I don't think Adobe intended to have life preflight as "be all end all" tool for designers nor meant to kill off pro level work. I just dislike the thought they are pitching this function to designers as if though it will save them from design mistakes or bad layout creation. Live Preflight is a step up from CS3 version but still a mini-version of what Acrobat Prof does and certainly far behind PitStop plugin.

I see the live-preflight in InDesign as a another nice tool for the professional designer to help him avoid mistakes. Especially mistakes that would go unnoticed otherwise: untagged RGB images in the layout which get converted to CMYK upon output and won't be catched by a preflight of the PDF, for example.

The non-pro-level worker will most likely not know about this feature, won't turn it on, use wrong settings ("the error went away after I changed the settings to ignore resolution of images") or simply doesn't understand what the error messages mean.

The professional will have checked his final PDF with a preflight anyway, InDesigns new feature just takes some of this and puts it earlier in his workflow. In most cases, noticing a problem earlier equals less stress and time spent to solve the problem.

[Lukas Engqvist]

I think it is up to us to give our clients good preflight profiles. It will take some time and it is a total rework of the old preflight that warned for RGB images even if they were properly colour managed. It is a good tool it is up to us to learn how to use it , and give feed back to Adobe on how we wanr it improved. Look at it in the long term, we don't want to be fixing silly mistakes again and again. Sure it's a job…�*but is it a life? Do the job of making a good preflight checklist once and be done wit that.