A Word About Postscript

Many people ask if it is possible for FLIGHTCHECK® to examine postscript files. The answer is FLIGHTCHECK® will most certainly examine a postscript file, but this will most likely always be to a very limited degree. The problem is even if FLIGHTCHECK® could detect problems with the postscript drawing commands, it could become extremely difficult to fix the problems, thus causing one instead to have to return to the application which created the postscript file in order to make the required corrections and to output a whole new postscript file. Therefore, checking a postscript file is much too late on the workflow chain.

FLIGHTCHECK® excels in examining the native document, long before going to press, as it can detect flaws and potential problems that could never be discovered within the postscript file. FLIGHTCHECK® can examine each object on the page with precision and it can also know its relationship to other objects. On the other hand, in the postscript world there is literally no difference between drawing four straight lines and a drawing which is really a rectangle. It is likewise next to impossible to determine if drawn text is part of a story or not because characters are often drawn one by one at unique positions (meaning there is no concept of a “story”) and it would clearly be a major feat to go backwards and gather up the characters to reform the original story.

The point is that the purpose of FLIGHTCHECK® is to guarantee that the resulting postscript file will be free of problems, and so it does not make sense for FLIGHTCHECK® to worry itself over the final postscript file. It may very well be that the printing world would like to have FLIGHTCHECK® work better with raw postscript files, but the truth is the printing world also needs to learn that preparing excellent documents and checking them ahead of time is the correct process order and that FLIGHTCHECK® itself should not be used to examine postscript, but instead should be considered a tool that can assist in creating better postscript files. In turn, other software can be employed for imposition, trapping, and so on, and these work ideally with postscript files, but FLIGHTCHECK® should always be used on the original native document because keeping FLIGHTCHECK® in its natural position earlier in the workflow allows one to take advantage of its superior document checking features.