Ad preflight

Workflow:

•Design team downloads ads from Ad Orbit and places them in the issue’s ad folder on drop box with simple name (Alabama.pdf)

•A.D. assigns preflight to a designer and alerts them when to start on an issue’s files. 

•Designer preflights ads using Adobe Acrobat Pro, and may need to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to complete corrections. They should be proficient in all 3 programs.

•Designer alerts A.D. of any problems that they cannot fix (i.e. low res images, wrong dimensions, etc.)

•A.D. will alert the sales rep or the sales assistant that the client should correct and resubmit.

(if designer is on staff, the A.D. would be omitted from this process and replaced by designer)

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Using Adobe Acrobat Pro:

Much of this explanation below was taken from Adobe’s website but has been modified for our magazines procedure.

To verify that your Adobe® PDF contains only the features, fonts, and formatting that you’ve specified, use the Preflight tool to inspect and, in certain cases, correct the document’s contents.

About preflight inspections

The Preflight tool analyzes the contents of a PDF to determine its validity for print production and a variety of other conditions that you can specify. Preflight inspects the file against a set of user-defined values, called preflight profiles. Depending on the profile, the preflight inspection can also correct certain errors. Preflight also runs checks and fixups on visible areas or certain objects and makes PDFs comply with various standards.

Preflight identifies issues with colors, fonts, transparency, image resolution, ink coverage, PDF version compatibility and more. Preflight also includes tools for examining PDF syntax or the actual PDF structure of a document.

Before you use the Preflight tool or create a PDF for print, follow these recommendations:

• If you created PDFs using Acrobat Distiller, InDesign or Illustrator, optimize them for print or press. Use either the pre-defined settings in Distiller or InDesign PDF styles or settings provided by your print service provider.
• Embed all fonts from within the authoring application. Embedding ensures that fonts aren’t substituted.
• Our printer suggest PDFx/1a files with crops and 1/8 inch bleed. They can supply you with instructions on how to set up an export. 

You can use or modify an existing profile, or create your own.

1.     Open the PDF and choose Tools > Print Production > Preflight in the right pane.

2.     Navgiate here: In Acrobat/ More Tools/ Print Production/ Preflight/ PDF Fixups/ PDF/X Compliance/ Convert to PDF/X-1a (SWOP)

3.     Click Analyze to run the inspection without fixing the errors or Analyze And Fix to identify and fix the problems. If you selected a single check only, the Analyze option is available. If you selected a single fixup, click Fix to start a fixup.

Note: 

You can also double-click a profile in the list to run the preflight inspection. If you double-click the file, profiles that contain fixups apply the fixups.

Things to look for and to do

1.     Place full page ads in InDesign to inspect where the crops and bleeds fall.  If an advertiser is unable to resubmit the file for whatever reason and you have crop marks in the bleed area you have a couple of options.

a.     You can enlarge the ad as long as the text doesn’t expand beyond the LIVE area (1/4 inch from edge). 

b.      You can remove crop marks in Adobe Acrobat Pro