Effective Pre-Press Proofing and Artwork Comparisons
File-to-File Comparison
EyeC Quality solutions are not just for ensuring the printed article is correct; if the artwork or plates are not right in the first place you may produce a perfect print job .. of the wrong artwork! It does sometimes happen that at the pre-press stage that unintentional changes are made e.g. fonts are changed, text or graphical objects are deleted or moved. EyeC Proofiler Graphic and Proofiler Text are an invaluable aid to checking for errors at origination and pre-press activities. There are two basic modules Proofiler Graphic and Proofiler Text.
Proofiler Graphic from EyeC is a powerful software comparator that is used in artwork or pre-press departments for print proofing and comparing files graphically. It compares two vectored or live text files (PDF, BMP, TIFF or JPEG) as graphical objects and clearly displays any differences to the operator so they can be evaluated as to whether they are intentional changes or errors that have been inadvertently introduced while making a version change or at repro. It can even be used to check the RIP’d file and stepped file against the customer proof.
A Proofiler Graphic will detect:
- Content errors of any kind
- Version mix-ups
- Font changes
- Missing special fonts
- Incorrect character spacing
- Missing special characters
- Incorrect font attributes
- Incorrect picture files
- Wrong bar codes
- Wrong colors
- Incorrect barcode design (optional)
and more.
With EyeC Proofiler Graphic you will stop wasting expensive consumables and valuable machine time because of problems that could have been detected at pre-press already.
Whereas Proofiler Graphic compares files with similar layouts, Proofiler Text compares text in files where the text has reflowed or may have totally different layouts, fonts and attributes. It is practically impossible to proof such documents using graphical comparisons or overlays, but Proofiler Text has no difficulty in proofing the text in documents automatically. This is extremely useful if text has changes between two versions of a document and where a graphical comparison would show up too many variations due to text reflow. It can be used very early in the artwork workflow because it can for example compare a Word document such as a ‘Manuscript’ used by pharmaceutical companies or ‘Pack Copy’ used by the food industry against the final artwork (prior to vectoring). Differences in layout, fonts, attributes and hyphenation can be ignored.
Proofiler Text works for single pages, brochures, technical manuals or a complete book. It does not care about language and is equally at home proofing pictorial languages such Chinese and Japanese, right to left flowing languages such as Hebrew and Arabic or a mixture of all these on the same page!
Quite often annotations are used within a PDF to indicate where changes need to be made. During the draft review process these annotations or ‘sticky notes’ can also be automatically compared to the modified text.
Our customers report that using our automated proofing software saves time and reduces the number of iterations an artwork goes through to get it right. With Proofiler Text and Proofiler Graphic you get it right first time and reduce your time to market – invaluable to most organisations.