Use Enfocus Switch to Automate Preflight – Jason's Tech Tips

Howdy folks, it's Jason from Rods and Cones. Let me show you something cool about Switch. Today, let's show you automated preflight.

First, we're going to create a new flow and we'll go ahead and name this preflight. All flows start with a folder. This is where the jobs you're going to test are going to drop in.

We could connect it to a hot folder, an email, or a web front end, but it just represents where the workflow starts. Since we're automating preflight, I'll do a quick search in my flow elements list for preflight and move in the InFocus Pitstop Server element. Now, let's choose a preflight profile.

There's a bunch of different standards we could preflight a file against. I'm going to choose a standard from the Gantt work group, which is optimized for a cut sheet digital. So when preflight is done, you're going to end up with one of two results.

Either the job is passed or failed. Let's create a landing page for jobs that pass and we'll go ahead and call it pass. We'll connect it to the preflight element.

Since this is the pass connection, we only need to move along the data portion, which in this case is the PDF file we were preflighting. We want to be sure we only pass along the success status jobs, not the warning or error status jobs. Jobs that pass preflight will fall into this folder.

And later on, we can move it off to your job server through imposition directly to press whatever your workflow needs. On the other hand, if preflight fails, we'll need a place for those jobs to go. Let's create a new folder and call it fail.

And we'll connect that to the preflight server carrying only the log, which in this case is the report of the preflight failure. We want to make sure that we don't send success along this train. If a job fails preflight, I typically need to communicate about it for somebody.

So I'm going to go ahead and add a mail send, and then we're going to go down to the body and give it a useful body text. We'll say this job is bad. Since that's not super descriptive, we'll go ahead and attach the file that came in as well so that the preflight report goes along with the email.

Go ahead and save this workflow, activate it, and right there in just a couple of minutes, we've created an automatic preflight workflow that can save your prepress crew hundreds of hours in manual review.