The second stage is the actual creation and production of the document. The computer operators begin using their desktop publishing applications by creating pages and laying down the boxes that will contain the text or images. The writers begin typing the text while the scanner operators begin cranking out the images and eventually these stories and pictures are all brought together and placed into the document at their designated positions. If the document is fully designed up front, creating the document becomes a mere formality of duplicating the original specs.
However, when you have too many people working on the same document, new problems arise in the workflow leading to the conclusion that document revisions will need to be controlled and maintained especially when various people are making frequent changes. If an operator decides to change a font because they claim the document will “look better”, then be warned that any deviation from the originally specs move you down a road towards failure. As your workflow develops, a decision or agreement should be made as to which fonts should be used and which ones should be avoided and this is commonly based upon experience and more often learned from a poor printout.
One reason why it is so important to understand the creation stage of the workflow process is that certain potential printing problems can actually be prevented at this time! If you think about it long enough, it might just be true that one should always strive towards NOT using FLIGHTCHECK® - for if a document is perfectly created per the design specs you could almost skip having to precheck it. By knowing, for example, what particular types of fonts you should use for the text and what particular types of images can be acceptably printed, the need to perform extensive flightchecking later on will diminish. In other words, by studying your own particular workflow, improving it wherever possible and becoming an expert, documents can be created with a high degree of confidence, thereby naturally preventing printing disasters.
To deviate from the original ideas when creating the document means the final output may likewise deviate from the originally conceived quality. However, it may be one thing to design a document in hopes of having no printing problems and quite another to create a flawless document based on those plans. For example, as you begin to place objects that overlap, new problems are introduced such as the consequences of printing overlapping colors during color separations and aligning the registrations. Furthermore, the document design may not have been detailed enough to account for a host of other unforseen printing problems that FLIGHTCHECK® will fortunately be able to pick up, such as hairlines, incorrect color usage, improper mixtures of fonts, rotated or skewed boxes, transparent fills, bitmap frames, stylized text, images with contrasts applied, and so forth.
Therefore, in most workflows the document design is merely the basic layout, or in other words the “suggested” positions of the main objects, and the actual document creation is where these areas are filled in, either by inserting text or placing an image, and as the document is being formed, new problems arise when coloring the objects, stylizing the text, or altering the images by using features of the application such as coloring an image, scaling an image, framing an image, adding a text runaround to an image object and so forth.
As you use FLIGHTCHECK® you will begin to learn how to more correctly build a document, what to use, what to avoid, and as your skills improve you will begin to see FLIGHTCHECK® approving of and passing a larger number of your documents, thus improving the production speed and quantity of your particular workflow.
