The company's Version 1.3 of its preflight tool for Adobe InDesign CS and CS2 facilitates group design projects and offers a unique "on the fly" correction feature.Markzware, a developer of software solutions for the global printing and graphic arts industries, has released FlightCheck Studio for Adobe InDesign CS and CS2.
FlightCheck Studio is a preflight solution for checking digital documents, and with this release the company has highlighted the "in-flight" preflighting tool that catches design mistakes or issues during the process of document creation.
FlightCheck Studio 1.3 checks items such as layout, color space, fonts, style sheets, image types, image resolution and other design-specific items.
The company also said the release does a much more thorough preflight check than the built-in preflight in InDesign.
Doug Rosen, Director of Training and Education for Santa Ana, Calif.-based Markzware Software, said FlightCheck Studio also allows the saving and distributing of rule sets that are called Policies, which help unify creatives or designers working on group design projects.
Another unique feature in the release is the "on the fly" correction feature, which is similar to a spell-checker. Rosen said using this feature helps designers catch problem issues and helps users maintain the job within specifications as it's being worked on.
According to Rosen, the way the on-the-fly feature works in FlightCheck Studio 1.3, users must click on a button as they are working in order to see if the job meets their criteria. If there are problems, FlightCheck Studio will present those and give the user the opportunity to fix them on the spot.
"This keeps the flow linear and smooth for the designer or creator, and they don't have to jump around a lot to keep things on track," Rosen said.
Rosen added, "FlightCheck Studio has actually pushed the ability to build a job to a certain specification right into the hands of the document creator. You can't go too much further upstream, unless you start dealing with the actual pieces that the designer uses to create a job."
Not to rest on its preflighting laurels, Rosen said, the company is also at the early development stages of a QuarkXPress to InDesign plug-in, but there is no set completion date. The development is designed as a bundle release, giving users the ability to convert Quark 5.0 and 6.0 documents using the QuarkXPress to InDesign plug-in, and then bring them up to spec with FlightCheck Studio for InDesign.
FlightCheck Studio Version 1.3 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.4. Pricing for the tool runs $150 and it's available now.
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