## Printing Tools (1)

### The Preflight Verifier

“Preflight” is a word borrowed from the process that pilots go through as they check out their plane prior to takeoff. In the context of Scribus, it is meant to describe a check of a document for potential or likely issues in a commercial printing environment. Even though these may not have the life-and-death import of problems that might occur with an aircraft, making mistakes in a document can be financially costly and cause you to look and feel incompetent. Creating a document that will work without issues in a given commercial printing workflow doesn’t require years of academic training. What it does require, though, is some background knowledge, and this Online Help provides at least some of the necessary information. Even better, Scribus comes with a software tool called “Preflight Verifier,” which helps to identify potential problems more easily, and whose warnings you should only ignore if you know that you can safely do so.

The Preflight Verifier can be started from the Menu Bar via Windows > Preflight Verifier. It will also show up automatically, if any errors have been detected when you try to print, to start the Print Preview or to export to PDF, EPS or PostScript:

Via “Current Profile:” you can select the file type of your export/print destination: PostScript (which includes EPS), PDF 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 or X-3. The default profile is the one you selected in the Document Setup or the Preferences (see below). Beneath the profile selector you can see a list of all items in your document. In the first column of the overview, those items for which Scribus didn’t detect any errors will be indicated by a green check mark. Objects with potential errors will be indicated by a warning sign. The second column will show the potential error, and the third column shows the layer, on which the item has been placed, indicated by its color and its name. By selecting an item in this dialog, you also select the item itself, and Scribus will jump to the respective page. After fixing a potential error, you can let the Preflight Verifier check the document again. You can also choose to ignore the warning(s) and print or export anyway.

In many cases, you might consider these to be simple warnings rather than errors in the usual sense. For example, in the dialog above, you may be already aware that Image13 is a GIF and has a low resolution, but you didn’t have any choice about using it as is. Even so, this can serve as a reminder to carefully check that image in your PDF to see if it meets your needs. On the other hand, it’s more likely that either you forgot to delete that empty Image12 or forgot to load an image, and you probably didn’t want text to overflow in the Text9 frame. Certainly in a large document, and despite repetitive manual proofreading, these kinds of mistakes can easily happen.

As almost everything else in Scribus, the Preflight Verifier can be configured via the Document Setup or the Preferences:

> Adding your own profile:
> Simply use one of the existing profiles, such as PostScript you see below, and change the name. Once you do this, the Add Profile button will become active, so that you can save your profile after you change the settings as you wish. Don't worry, the original PostScript profile will still be there.

The options in this panel are as follows:

- File Type (drop-down list): Here you can select which print/export filetype’s potential issues Scribus will check for by default.
- Ignore all errors: From what you have read before, you can hopefully conclude that you would be ill-advised to check this option – an error discovered after a commercial print-run could prove to be costly.
- Automatic check before printing or exporting: Having this option active means that the Preflight Verifier will not only be launched intentionally by you via the Menu Bar, but also automatically when you want to print or to export PostScript or PDF files and in case an error has been detected.
- Check for missing glyphs: This option will let Scribus check for missing glyphs in a font. Do not underestimate the importance of this option, as a simple change of a font, e.g. via a style sheet or direct formatting, can result in text using glyphs that aren’t available in the new font.
- Check for items not on a page: You can easily move or even create items outside a page, i.e., in the gray canvas space (the Scratch Space) around the pages. While this is a useful feature, it may wreak havoc to a PostScript or PDF file that’s destined for commercial printing, and it’s quite easy to “forget” such a Scratch Space item (e.g. an empty frame). Thus, you are strongly advised to not disable this option.
- Check of overflow in text frames: As an avid reader of this Online Help you know for sure that working with Scribus is mostly frame-based, and of course you are also aware of the necessity to either reduce the font size or to enlarge a text frame or to link to a subsequent frame if the text doesn’t fit into a particular frame. Similar to the “missing glyphs” issue, one of the likely issues that may ruin or devaluate your costly print is the change of a font, since the glyph widths change from font to font. In some cases, even using the same font on different platforms or even the same font on the same computer may result in a text overflow, as the update may have installed a new version of a font file with different font metrics.
- Check for used transparencies: The PostScript file format doesn’t support transparency, and neither does the PDF 1.3 specification, which is still supported by Scribus. Since PDF/X-3 is also based on PDF 1.3, you only need this option active for the three previously mentioned export/print destinations.
- Check for missing images: Scribus doesn’t store bitmap images in its own file format; it only creates links to files in one of the supported bitmap formats. Since it can easily happen that users save an image under a different name, another file format or another location, the link to the image may become a “dead link”, i.e. the image frame will be empty, an issue that can be easily overlooked. This option lets Scribus detect such dead links.
- Check image resolution: As an enlightened reader you already know that the resolution of bitmap images can be critical to the success of a print run – if the resolution is too low, images will look awful when printed, and if the resolution is too high, the file size of an exported PostScript or PDF file may be too large to be handled by a commercial Raster Image Processor (RIP). This option will let Scribus check whether the resolution of an image is too high or low for a certain output destination. As you can see, you can change the limits in both directions, but keep in mind that the default values make sense in most cases.
- Check for placed PDF files: Scribus can import PDF files into image frames via Ghostscript. However, since Scribus lets Ghostscript “rasterize” (i.e.: create a bitmap image of) an imported PDF file, you may not like the result. Moreover, the quality of the file import depends on the Ghostscript version you have installed. Hence the option to let Scribus check for placed PDF files, which is especially useful if you exchange Scribus files between computers with different Ghostscript versions installed.
- Check for GIF images: You already learned that GIF files have no place in professional printing, but while you know this, you may still receive a ZIP-archive from others with a Scribus file and related images, some of which may very well be GIFs. So while the GIF threat need not be imminent, it doesn’t hurt to leave the check mark where it is by default.
- Check for PDF Annotations and Fields: PDF files that contain Annotations and Fields will be rejected by every commercial Raster Image Processor (RIP), so if you want to create a print-ready PDF file, you are advised to have this option active.
- Ignore non-printable layers: This option will help you to only export the layers that are marked as “printable”, which is especially helpful if you created a file with language-specific layers.
- Check for Visible/Printable Mismatch in Layers: The possibility to make a layer invisible during the process of designing is very helpful, but forgetting to switch on visibility again may result in a PostScript or PDF file with missing elements. The reverse can also happen: You may create a document with multiple layers for different languages or different color patterns. This option will let Scribus investigate whether a visible layer is also “printable”, and in this context “printable” also means that the layer or its content will be exported.

### The Print Preview

As mentioned in the previous section, one of the challenges of using an advanced DTP application like Scribus is handling “high-level” PostScript output. If you happen to be able to use a real PostScript printer (which won’t be a device that’s as small as your photo printer), you may start to appreciate some of Scribus’s PostScript/printing features. Let’s have a closer look at the Print Preview, which can be called via File > Print Preview.

The Print Preview in Scribus is quite special, as it does more than just generate a screendump of your document. Scribus creates its Print Preview by actually generating and analyzing a temporary PostScript file. Have patience when launching the Print Preview, as there’s a lot of processing going on in the background! It is worth mentioning here that this is one of the functions of Scribus which requires Ghostscript to be installed on your computer.

The Print Preview, in connection with the Preflight Verifier, can help you with identifying potential issues in a file-to-printer PostScript workflow. The reliability and precision of the Print Preview mostly depend on the capabilities of your printing system, including the quality of the device drivers, along with the types of advanced features included in your documents. The types of features which can be troublesome with some printing setups include gradients, transparency and complex masking, to name a few.

Most options in the Print Preview have been created for advanced PostScript or commercial printing. Thus, most, if not all options in this dialog are probably superfluous if your printing device is a simple desktop printer.

The first set of check boxes deals with “Display Settings” related to printing:

- Enable Aliasing enables/disables previewing text with anti-aliased fonts. This only affects PostScript fonts and may slow down rendering slightly.
- Display Transparency displays the page background transparently.
- Display CMYK: Enabling this option gives you a simulation of generic CMYK inks, as well as spot colors on the screen. Once activated, you can selectively disable/enable the display of any CMYK or spot color.
- Display Ink Coverage: This option lets Scribus calculate and display the ink coverage for each part of a page. In the screenshot below, the coverage for the ink color “Magenta” is shown.

The second set of options relates to previewing a document within the Print Preview. These will be described in the section about the actual printing dialog. The options at the bottom of the dialog should be self-explanatory.