How To
Send a file that passes on the first try
What a sign shop's preflight actually checks, and how to clear every item before you hit send.
From the prepress chair, most delays do not come from the printer. They come from the file. The art looks fine on the designer's screen, lands in our inbox, and falls apart the moment it meets production rules it was never built for. The good news is that nearly everything that bounces a file comes down to four things, and all four are fixable in a couple of minutes before you ever send it.
The four things that bounce a file
Live fonts. If the type is still live and the font does not travel with the file, the RIP substitutes another face, and your careful type becomes someone else's. Outline the type, or embed the fonts fully, so the letters are locked.
Low-resolution images. Resolution is about the final printed size, not the pixel count. A logo that looks crisp in a slide deck can be 16 dpi once it is blown up to a ten-foot banner. Aim for your shop's minimum, often 150 dpi, measured at the size it actually prints.
Linked art. A placed image that is linked instead of embedded does not travel with the PDF. The file arrives, the high-res art does not, and you are printing a gray box. Embed everything.
The wrong color space. Art built in RGB or Lab is headed to a CMYK device. Colors shift, and the rich blacks and bright blues you approved on screen print dull. Build in CMYK, or your defined spot colors, from the start.
The pre-send checklist
- Outline the type, or embed every font fully.
- Check effective resolution at final printed size, 150 dpi or your shop's number.
- Embed every placed image so it travels with the file.
- Convert the art to CMYK, or your spot-color setup.
- Export a single, flattened PDF.
- Open the PDF once and look at it before you send.
Shop tip
Resolution is about final size, not file size. Before you send, ask what the piece prints at, then check the image at that size. Two thousand pixels is plenty for a yard sign and nowhere near enough for a building wrap.
Why the first try matters
A clean file skips the whole round trip: the bounce, the email, the re-export, the wait. On our end FlightDeck runs exactly these checks the moment a file lands, and when something fails it writes the note back to the sender listing what to fix. So think of this as the shop's own checklist, handed to you from the inside. Clear these four and your file moves straight to the queue.