Uninformed users

[bprint_tampabay]

I assume this has probably been covered before, and if it has I apologize, but I was just wondering how many of you have to deal with people attempting to "preflight" or even just determine the usability of files (or attempting to print them) without the slightest idea of what the hell they are looking at.

I sit and watch in wonder at the futility of it all...

Maybe it is just me.

[mattbeals]

You need a good preflight profile and an easy to understand report. The built in preflight tool for Acrobat is great, as is callas pdfToolbox and Enfocus PitStop. If you are looking at native files FlightCheck Pro makes it really easy to check documents. You can alsu use FlightCheck to diagnose PDF's.

As to what do you do? There's no easy answer. You can simply say "if it fails it does not print". When you get into warnings then you have a problem. Who decides how significant a warning is? Training and experience is the only answer for that.

[Colorblind]

I work for an ad agency and it still happens to me once in a while, mostly with magazine and newspapers coordinators and even sometimes with supposedly skilled prepress operators. Goes from not viewing the PDF with "Overprint Preview" turned on to "your PDF has tiny white lines everywhere" (atomic regions). Even had one of these smart newspaper prepress guy rasterized my PDF in Photoshop (the ad got printed that way). All I supply is CMYK PDFX1a...

[bprint_tampabay]

I appreciate the responses.

How do you train the untrainable? I am talking customer service/production mgr folks who are as dense as a box of rocks.

I try to force them into sending ALL files to me to preflight, but it doesn't sink in.

I guess I am just SOL.

Thx anyway

[DavidMa]

such is the life in Prepress, it happens to all of us at some point.
You do what you can, try to fix what you can, teach the untrained, and hope for the best.

good luck, and don't think it's just you.

cheers!

[bprint_tampabay]

I guess my biggest frustration is that I don't understand the psychology behind it.

Do you think that they are all frustrated pre-press ops?

That they think there is some kind of glory in it?

HA

[DCurry]

Do you think that they are all frustrated pre-press ops?

Is there any other kind?

[John Clifford]

Uhm, Are you suggesting that there isn't glory in prepress?

Damn! I was IN IT for the glory.