A Tuesday in prepress
Your prepress operator opens the first file of the morning. It is a menu for a restaurant, supplied as a Word document exported to PDF. No bleed, the logo is a 72dpi JPEG from the website, and the fonts are not embedded. The next file is fine. The one after that is a folded leaflet set up on a single page with the panels the wrong widths.
Each problem means an email to the customer or to the account handler, explaining what bleed is, why the image will look soft, and what to send instead. Some customers reply within the hour. Some reply on Thursday. The job sits on hold, and the press slot you planned for it goes to something else.
Why the same faults keep arriving
Most commercial printers take artwork from a mix of professional designers and small businesses doing it themselves. The designers usually get it right. The rest do not know what a printer needs, and nothing at the point of upload tells them.
- Artwork arrives by email, WeTransfer, the website and occasionally a USB stick, with no check at any of them.
- Every file is checked by eye, so checking scales with volume, not with difficulty.
- The explanation of each fault is rewritten from scratch in every email.
- Faults found late, after the job is scheduled, cost more than faults found at upload.
- There is no record of which customers repeatedly send problem files.
The real cost of a slow preflight
The obvious cost is prepress time spent on routine checks rather than on imposition and plate output. The less obvious costs are the press slots lost when a job goes on hold, the rush when approval finally arrives, and the reprints when a fault slips through because the operator was hurrying. Customers also notice. A printer that sends back a vague 'your file has problems' email feels harder to deal with than one that explains exactly what to fix.
An automated preflight intake
- One upload route for all artwork, linked to the job number, replacing the loose emails and transfer links.
- Automated checks run the moment a file arrives: page size against the job spec, bleed, image resolution, colour space, spot colours, fonts, overprint and minimum line weights. Tools such as Enfocus PitStop can do the checking; we connect it to your jobs.
- Faults that your rules say are safe to fix, such as converting RGB to CMYK with your chosen profile, are fixed automatically and logged.
- Faults that need the customer get a clear reply written from a library of explanations, with a marked-up preview, sent the same minute.
- Files that pass, or pass after fixes, move to the prepress queue with the job flagged as artwork ready.
- Anything unusual goes to a person with the check report attached, so they start from the answer rather than from a blank screen.
| Fault | Handled automatically? | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| RGB images | Yes, if your rules allow | Converted with your profile and logged |
| Missing bleed | No | Customer sent a marked-up explanation |
| Low resolution image | No | Customer told which image and why |
| Wrong page size | No | Flagged against the job spec |
| Fonts not embedded | Sometimes | Outlined where safe, otherwise queried |
Prepress after the change
Your operator stops being a help desk and goes back to being a prepress operator. Jobs reach the press with artwork already confirmed, so the schedule holds. Account handlers can see which jobs are waiting on the customer and for which fault. And you have a record of repeat problem customers, which helps when you set expectations with them or offer a design service.
Signs your artwork intake needs fixing
- Jobs regularly go on hold waiting for corrected files.
- Your prepress operator writes the same explanation several times a day.
- Artwork arrives through more than one route and sometimes goes missing.
- You have reprinted a job because a fault was missed.
- Nobody can say quickly which live jobs are waiting on artwork.