PDF (Preflight) check

Overview

Please check that you open PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Professional, and not Adobe Reader or Preview (Mac only) as a lot of the features are not available. (Please note, these instructions are for users on Acrobat Pro 10 or later).

To check PDFs are print ready, you need to do some quick manual and automated checks.

Manual PDF checks

Colour, Separations, Inks and Overprint

These checks should be done by the user visually on screen, by selecting Output Preview (Acrobat Pro);

• Print ready colour PDFs should be tagged with a colour profile (‘Output Intent’ – usually Coated Fogra39, ISO Coated v2 or PSO Uncoated profiles) to stipulate how the PDF will be printed. If the tag is not one of these profiles, the printer will have trouble matching the PDF to a proof or previous printed sheets.
• Ink and finish separations have be named and coloured appropriately.
• Overprint check for print finishes set to overprint and inks to knockout (or where they should not) otherwise the print supplier will have problems with producing good quality work.

More information can be found on the Output Preview (Acrobat Pro) page.

Dimensions and Measurements

• Check the spine width measurement for covers and jackets
• Check the Trim Page Size (TPS)

Use the Measuring Tool under Analyze in the Tools menu (Tools > Analyze > Measuring Tool), to measure distances on the PDF. Click the first point to measure, then click the second point, and finally a third click to get the actual distance.

For exact trim page size measurement use the ‘Crop Pages’ option under Pages in the menu  (Tools > Pages > Crop) and double click on the PDF page to bring up the Crop Pages dialog box to display its TrimBox information. Use the drop down to select Trim size (see screen grab).

Crop Pages dialog window

Automated PDF checks (Preflighting)

Installation

Please note that if you are running Fuse, it will already have downloaded these preflight profiles into Acrobat on your Mac, you do not need to download these manually again!

1. Download and save the compressed .zip file containing all our preflight settings/profiles to your desktop
2. Mac users – double click on your downloaded .zip file to uncompress (this creates a new folder)
3. PC users – right click on your downloaded .zip file, and from the list select Extract All to uncompress the settings (this creates a new folder)
4. In Adobe Acrobat Pro, open any PDF and under the Tools option select Print Production then Preflight to bring up the Preflight window
5. To load preflight profiles select Options in top right of Preflight window and choose Import Preflight Profile…
6. Options >
   
7. Select the preflight profile you want to load from the uncompressed settings folder and click OK. Repeat for each preflight profiles as you can only load one at a time.
8. All preflights by default, will be available in the Preflight window under Imported Profiles

The profiles will now be available and remain loaded into Acrobat, and will be ready to use every time Acrobat Pro is launched.

Now these profiles are loaded into Acrobat Pro they can be used to check open PDFs, or to create a ‘droplet’ in order to check multiple files at once.

Creating PDF preflight droplets

Droplet are a quick and easy way to Preflight multiple files in one go.

After installing the preflight checks into Acrobat Pro (see above), choose a Preflight profile and from the Option menu, select the Create Preflight Droplet…

Then choose so save the droplet on your desktop with the following options:

You can now drag groups of PDF files and drop onto the droplet on your desktop

Tips:

• On a PC, if you see an error when dragging lots of files try running a smaller amount of files on the droplet.
• Files can be checked from a server, they don’t need to be copied first.
• Don’t choose to move or copy any files, just choose to display a summary PDF (see pic with options above)
• Acrobat does not need to be opened before running as droplet, it will be opened in order to run the files through the preflight.

Understanding PDF preflight report results

	Errors Preflight errors show major problems in PDFs which will cause production problems or result in image quality and colour problems when printing. These problems need to be fixed in the origination files (e.g. InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator) and the PDFs remade and rechecked.
	Warnings Preflight warnings show potential problems in PDFs which need to be checked in the PDF files. They give us clues that the PDFs may not have been prepared following our guidelines and after checking, this information should be fed back to the PDF creator for use in the future. This is especially true on PDFs created for uncoated paper where the ink limit is much lower.
	Information Preflight info are to highlight things in PDFs which may be a mistake but also may have been done intentionally. This may be an alert that translation text has moved to the colour layer and should be followed up.

The table below lists preflight error descriptions, and possible fixes to help eliminate PDF Preflight fails at Production stage before they are sent to press.

There are no bleed or stroke weight checks in our PDF Preflight, but SourceReport does have checks for these, as follows:
Bleed 3mm / Bleed 5mm / Bleed 15mm / Bleed Min 15mm / Slug 30mm
Black Stroke Weights Minimum / Black Stroke Weights Recommended
Colour Stroke Weights Minimum / Colour Stroke Weights Recommended

List of PDF Preflight checks

Printing out PDFs

We recommend that if you are planning to check a colour PDF by printing it out, that you switch on the Simulate Overprint checkbox in the Print window to get a more accurate rendition. Please note, laser printer colour output is inaccurate and must not be used to judge final colour work.

Setting up Acrobat

Acrobat preferences

Preferences only need to be set once. Find the Preferences option in the menubar at the top of your screen.

1. Select Page Display (in long list on left of the window) and in the main window, tick on Show art, trim & bleed boxes and Show transparency grid (shows checkerboard, switch on/off at any time) and further down in the dropdown menu next to Use Overprint Preview: set to Always
2. Select Units & guides (in long list on left of the window) and choose Millimeters
3. Click OK to finish

Preferences dialog window

Acrobat tools

Tools also only need to be set once.With a PDF open, click on Tools in the top right corner of the window, then on the small page icon (circled) select only the recommended tools shown in the list (Content Editing, Pages, Print Production, Analyze). If you only have these tools visible, its much easier to find what your looking for in Acrobat Pro.

Troubleshooting

Thin white lines

You may occasionally see very thin lines over graphics that can’t be found in the original image file. Zooming in and out still displays the offending lines, but they do not get bigger when magnified. This is almost certainly Acrobat displaying the ‘stitching’ between transparency objects with a PDF.

These lines should be ignored as they will not print, but for peace of mind, you can switch off the setting that picks up these lines in PREFERENCES > [PAGE DISPLAY] and under the Rendering heading, uncheck “Smooth line art” and “Smooth images”.

Colour Management

If the PDF does not have an Output Intent,

Properties

Document properties can display;

• File name that created the PDF
• Creation and modification date of the PDF
• Application that created the PDF
• PDF version

Access the PDF properties window using FILE > PROPERTIES in the menubar.

With a file open, show the ‘Document Properties’ dialog box and choose the ‘Description’ tab.

• All PDFs supplied should be generated from InDesign, unless we are using very old QuarkXPress files. Check that the application states Adobe InDesign and its version.
• Rather than sending the file to another application (e.g. Acrobat Distiller) we specify that PDFs are exported directly from InDesign. If this has happened the PDF Producer will say ‘Adobe PDF Library’.
• The PDF Version should follow our standard PDF export settings.

If any of these points are not right then we know that the PDF has not been made to our PDF Presets and you should simply ask for it to be resupplied.