Preflight and Pantone colours
The expensive mistake isn't the bad file. It's the bad file you spotted after the run. PressKit's Preflight is the thirty-second check before you put paper on the press: select a file and hit Preflight in the top bar, or look at the Preflight tab in the Inspector on the right.
Every check returns one of four things: pass (fine), warning (look at this), error (don't print it like that), info (a fact, no judgement).
On images (JPG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, BMP)
- Resolution — below 300 DPI it's an error. If the file carries no DPI information at all, it's a warning: nobody knows what size it was meant for.
- Dimensions — size in pixels.
- Color Space — CMYK passes; anything else warns that conversion will be needed.
- Bit Depth
- Transparency — an alpha channel raises a warning: transparency doesn't always render correctly in print.
- ICC Profile — with no embedded profile, colours may shift.
On PSD / PSB
Dimensions, Color Mode, bit depth, layer count and — the useful one — Hidden Layers: hidden layers are a warning, because that's usually where the old price or the old logo is hiding.
On PDF / AI
- PDF Version and PDF/X Standard (it tells you if the file is PDF/X)
- Color Space — clean CMYK passes; plain RGB warns "convert to CMYK"; mixed RGB + CMYK warns too, and it's the commonest trap in artwork that's been through many hands
- Spot Colors — it tells you if there are any
- Transparency — live transparency, with a note that older RIPs may need it flattened
- Fonts — which font types it found (Type1, TrueType, CID/OpenType) or "no embedded fonts — likely outlined"
- Overprint — if overprint settings are present
- Pages — approximate page count
On fonts
Select a font file and you get family, style, glyph count and Greek Support — whether it has Greek at all. That answers "why am I getting boxes" once and for all.
Where it stops — say it plainly to yourself
The PDF check works by scanning the file's content, not by running a full PDF/X validation engine. It's fast triage, not Enfocus. That's why the page count is written with a ~, and why a "pass" doesn't replace your own eyes. It catches the big ones — RGB in a CMYK job, 72 DPI on a poster, a hidden layer, a font with no Greek — and those are 90% of the reprints.
A whole folder at once
Batch scans a folder (subfolders optional), runs preflight on every print file it finds and exports the result as CSV. Ideal when a catalogue of 80 files arrives and you want to know which two are trouble before you start.
Pantone colours, by name
Preflight tells you that there are spot colours. To see which, select the PDF or AI and open the spot-colour panel in the tools. You get a list with:
- the name of each separation, exactly as it's written inside the file (e.g.
PANTONE 485 C) - the alternate colour space (usually DeviceCMYK) — what it falls back to if printed in process
- a copy button, so you can paste it into the quote or the ink order
If the file has no spots, it says so plainly: process colours only.
⚠️ The name is whatever the designer typed. If they christened the colour "Spot1" or "Gold", that's what you'll see — there's no way to guess a Pantone code from a badly named separation. That's useful information too: it means ask the customer before you order ink.