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Alrighty, folks. Here was an interesting one. We got this file in here,
an
urgent, bad file. Customer can't open it. Quite a big file,
and, yeah, please help. We have our
file recovery service where we offer to fix
on a new-cure, no-pay situation, your bad InDesign files
...
in lieu of a product, like, for Quark, we have MarkzTools, which you can
pay $199
for and it works 80%, or so, of the time to fix your files.
In this case, we just do the service, as we don't have a product yet for it.
It also works, you know, about 80% of the time, which is pretty amazing.
Anyway, here was an interesting one. We took the file and, of course, we always first try to see
what happens in InDesign. We dropped it on InDesign
and we got this
"uses one or more plug-ins which are not currently available on your system.
Do you want to open anyway?"
Conditional text
in World Ready
...
We're going to try it anyway.
We'll zoom out and
see what happens.
Well, what you see immediately
you get the old
spinning beach ball,
never a good sign.
And then the watch
set at 9
o'clock sharp,
not doing anything.
And we get the message,
"Cannot open"
Alright. So,
I was just curious what happens if we try our recovery method of going through
Quark in
ID2Q, our conversion tool to open in Quark,
and then reopen it in InDesign from Quark via Q2ID, our Quark to InDesign plug-in.
Well, what happened when I went into Quark, and I'm not going to do it now,
because it
basically takes a long time, in this case, it was a very big file,
and obviously these plug-ins add a lot of data that can be
difficult to work with,
it crashed Quark
when we were doing, when we were
using Q2ID, but we did get a rescue file, which is very handy in Quark,
by the way.
Something
InDesign doesn't offer.
It lets you
try to see if you can do something with the file.
In this case, the file
was convertible
with
InDesign.
I'm not going to show you that either, because it also takes about a half an hour.
Obviously, something was very, you know, different in these files than the
normal file. In any event, it does open eventually, and we get this,
which we'll pop open,
just to show you that the file
that we have here,
and then the fixed one here,
how the process actually works, how we can actually open this file for
the customer.
Yeah, we get some missing font warnings, of course, and stuff like that, but, basically,
what you see here is we now can get into this file and get at the content.
And this customer can now get to work
doing whatever it is they need to do on this pretty
complex,
large
file here,
multiple, multiple pages here of
a lot of design work, a lot of content,
and
one thing I like here
is their slogan
"Quality is the product
of a good attitude"
and, with that in mind,
let's take the same file
and show you our new FlightCheck.
FlightCheck
Professional v6.5 is now out
with the InDesign CS4,
Illustrator,
PDF, QuarkXPress 8, etc. support,
and this is just a really great tool to help you check and look inside
files without having to pry through everything and hope to find a problem in this huge
document here,
which, you know, would likely take forever.
Another nice thing about FlightCheck is it also can collect your files,
all your fonts and images, package, as they call it in InDesign,
and very handy for Illustrator users, because they don't have that option in
Adobe in Illustrator.
We can collect
all your files, your Illustrator file, your fonts,
placed images...
So, let's see what FlightCheck tells us here on this file.
FlightCheck goes through and scans all the elements of your file,
looking for well over 300 potential problems to report back to you,
anything ranging from the missing font to the missing image, down to
transparency issues, hairlines,
and more
technical issues, like ICC profile, usage, trapping,
overlapping, etc.
You see the eagle working hard,
the eagle eye looking deep within your file, much like an x-ray,
to help you
very quickly understand
what's the technical
make up of this file,
and are there any problems we should zoom right into first to fix, before even
going deeper into the file?
Yes, it will tell you exactly where the problems are, the pages, and even helping navigate
to the problem.
Okay, so, here we see it,
a full report. Anything in blue is a warning. Red is a flat-out error,
as we set up in our Ground Controls. And I'm not going to give you a full demo now.
I'll link to where the full demo is. I just want to show you some of the
cool, basic uses of FlightCheck, and you could research it for yourself.
Now, we see here, there's ICC profile used
We have
different issues that we can
zoom in on and,
good point, I'll zoom in, too, so you can see some of the different various issues that we
can help you find here.
RGB may be a problem, maybe not, for you. It depends on... Here's one I like is the
small point size, exactly where
a particular font is used below a particular font size, which we set in the
Ground Controls to go look at.
So let's now
go look at the main screen, where we get a complete overview of the file,
and we can see information,
general information.