FlightCheck is a stand-alone application that performs preflight quality control inspection on many common file types such as

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, b ...

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in ras ...

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

, and

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

. Preflight in the graphic arts industry is the process of checking a digital document before it goes to the plate, print, or otherwise output (exported - such as to

). It is a way to check the quality before printing, digitally or otherwise, but it can also be used to check any common artwork file. Preflight may be done on the source

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

document, or before creating a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The term preflight was first used during a presentation in 1990 by Chuck Weger, a well-known industry consultant. There were some early postscript RIPs that interpreted data and provided a preflight report of sorts. The first commercial preflight application, called "FlightCheck," was introduced to the public b
Markzware
and appeared at the Seybold Seminars Conference at San Francisco in the Fall of 1995.
/ref> U.S. Patent, number 5,963,641 was subsequently granted - ‘Device and method for examining, verifying, correcting and approving

electronic document An electronic document is any electronic media content (other than computer programs or system files) that is intended to be used in either an electronic form or as printed output. Originally, any computer data were considered as something intern ...

s prior to printing, transmission or recording.’ Other preflighting tools have subsequently been introduced, mainly focusing on PDF

preflighting.

References

Desktop publishing software Printing software {{digital-typography-stub