ImposeIQ Preflight PRO guide

Quick start

1. Choose a PDF — or, online, press Open the sample postcard.
2. Pick a profile: a digital press with Duplo finishing, offset, or PDF/X. Adjust the checks changes any rule.
3. Press Check. Findings are listed by category; click one to see it on the page.
4. Tick the fixes you want (a fix tag beside a finding ticks it for you) and press Fix & Save As. The fixed copy is checked again straight away.
5. Save the HTML report or a marked-up PDF to send to the customer.

The online edition runs the same engine in your browser: your PDF is never uploaded, and everything it saves is marked as a demo and downloaded. Outside engines (callas pdfToolbox, Enfocus PitStop, hot folders) and the full set of colour profiles need the desktop Suite.

Checks, profiles & fixes

ImposeIQ Preflight PRO (it was called Preflight Repair) is the one preflight tool on the Home screen - the older ImposeIQ Preflight no longer has a tile. It is also what the MIS uses to check artwork as it arrives on a job. It reads every object on every page, the way callas pdfToolbox and Enfocus PitStop do: each path, text run, image and gradient, with its real position, colour, overprint and transparency. The older structural checks only looked at the file’s framework. Choose a PDF, pick a profile and press Check.

What it checks. About forty checks in eight groups:

• Pages and bleed. Bleed measured side by side from the artwork that reaches the trim (“short on the left, 0.03 in”). Also: text within the safety margin, a missing trim box, blank pages, mixed page sizes, the finished size against the job size, and page counts.
• Colour. RGB and Lab in vector art, text and images. Also: spot colours (with a keep list for spot UV and foil plates), the same spot under two spellings, registration colour on the artwork, and total ink for vector art and inside CMYK images. White objects set to overprint, which vanish on press, are caught too.
• Text and fonts. Fonts not embedded, Type 3 fonts, text below a minimum size, small reversed text, small rich-black text, small text in more than one ink, and black text not set to overprint.
• Lines. Hairlines and zero-width lines, measured at their printed width.
• Images. Effective resolution at the size each image is placed (with a separate floor for 1-bit line art), resolution far above what is needed, JPEG 2000 / JBIG2 compression, and 16-bit images.
• Transparency, layers and interactive content. Transparency, layers, content on hidden layers, printing comments and stamps, form fields, JavaScript and attached files.
• PDF/X through the existing structural checks.

Profiles. Profiles are built in for a digital press with Duplo finishing, offset coated (320% ink), offset uncoated (280%), newsprint (240%), wide format, Duplo DDC embellishment, PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4. Adjust the checks lets you change the severity (error, warning, note or off) and the limits of each check. Save the result under your own name; your profiles appear in the workflow step and the MIS as well.

Fixes. Each fix changes only the objects it is about. The fixed file is always saved as a copy. The fixes:

• Colour: overprint off on white objects; small black text set to overprint; small rich-black text to 100% K; spot colours to CMYK through each spot’s own CMYK recipe, keeping any spots you list (SpotUV, Foil); merging a spot named two ways; registration colour to black.
• Lines: hairlines thickened to a minimum.
• Document: hidden-layer content deleted and the layers removed; printing comments and form fields flattened into the page; JavaScript and application private data removed; an ICC output intent set.
• Already available before: mirrored bleed, page-box clean-up, rotation, attached files, the Trapped flag and ICC colour conversion.

Seeing the problems. Click a finding to open its page with every problem outlined: red for errors, orange for warnings, blue for notes. The trim and bleed boxes are shown dashed. Two more tabs are useful: Inks, fonts & images lists every ink, font, image (with its ppi) and colour space, and What changed lists what the fixes did.

Reports. Save report writes a self-contained HTML report. Save marked-up PDF writes a copy of the PDF with each problem outlined and commented, which is handy to send to a customer.

callas pdfToolbox, Enfocus PitStop and other engines

Shops that already own a preflight engine can use it through ImposeIQ. Open Engines… and add one. Find installed engines looks in Program Files for pdfToolbox and PitStopServerCLI.

• callas pdfToolbox (command line). Runs your .kfpx profile and reads pdfToolbox’s XML report. Exit codes 0–8 are the result (3 and 8 mean errors); 100 and above mean pdfToolbox could not run (licence, a damaged or encrypted file, a timeout). When the profile has fixups, the corrected PDF is kept.
• Enfocus PitStop Server (command line). Runs PitStopServerCLI with a Preflight Profile (.ppp) or Action List (.eal) and reads the task report and the XML report.
• Any other engine with a command line. Write its arguments with {input}, {output}, {report}, {profile}, {outdir} and {name}, and say which exit codes mean a pass or warnings only.
• Hot folders. For PitStop Server, Enfocus Switch or pdfToolbox Server hot folders. ImposeIQ drops the PDF into the input folder and waits for it to reappear in the success, warning or error folder, reading any report left in the report folder.

Whichever engine runs, the results come back in the same form: pass or fail, errors, warnings, pages and reports. No password is stored for any engine.

In workflows and the MIS

Workflows: the Preflight PRO (ImposeIQ app) step, first in the ImposeIQ apps list, checks every PDF on a job with the built-in engine or any engine above. The older Preflight and Preflight Repair steps are no longer offered for new workflows; workflows that already use them keep running, and their step name says to use Preflight PRO. The example workflows use Preflight PRO.

• With the built-in engine it can also apply fixes and carry the fixed file forward.
• It can check the finished size against the MIS job and save an HTML report and a marked-up PDF to a folder.
• It sets [var.preflightPassed], [var.preflightErrorCount], [var.preflightErrors] and [var.preflightReport] so a Route step can send failed files for approval.

MIS: each PDF on a job’s Artwork card has a Preflight button. The result shows as a Passed or Failed badge and is written into the job’s history. Setup → Artwork preflight chooses the engine and profile, whether to check against the job’s trim size, and whether to check incoming artwork automatically. That is on unless you turn it off: every PDF that arrives on a job — attached by hand, on a Storefront order, from a JDF ticket or from a workflow — is checked with Preflight PRO in the background, and the badge appears when it is done. Reports go in a Preflight folder beside the artwork (a Storefront upload’s go in the job’s own folder). A fixed copy never replaces the customer’s file.

Not tested yet on a real callas or PitStop install The connections follow callas’s and Enfocus’s published command-line documentation. Try one file through each engine before relying on it unattended.

Converting RGB to CMYK

This is a real ICC conversion, not a formula. Every plain RGB or grayscale fill, stroke and image is converted against the target profile you pick. What is deliberately left alone: spot colours (Separation and DeviceN), Indexed-palette images, JPEG2000 and fax-compressed images, and anything already CMYK. The report lists what was left so you can see what is still there.

Intent offers relative colorimetric (the default and the right answer for most print work), perceptual, saturation and absolute colorimetric. Absolute simulates the source paper white and is rarely what you want on a job going to press.

Declare the target profile as a PDF OutputIntent writes the profile into the file so a RIP knows what the CMYK numbers mean. On its own it does not certify PDF/X-1a conformance — run the PDF/X checks as well.

Files get bigger JPEG images are decoded, converted and re-saved uncompressed (Flate) rather than re-encoded as CMYK JPEG, because CMYK JPEGs have genuine interoperability bugs and a larger file that opens correctly everywhere beats a smaller one that might not. A photo-heavy job can grow noticeably; the report says by how much.

In a workflow

Repair is also available as an Automation Workflow step, which is where it earns its keep: a hot folder that repairs every arriving file to a saved preset before anything else touches it turns the worst part of customer intake into something that happens without you. The workflow step uses the same engine and the same presets as this window. See Preflight templates under Workflow Automation.

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