The success of a preflight inspection depends on how well you define the criteria for the inspection. The inspection criteria are packaged in a file called a preflight profile. A preflight profile includes one or more checks, fixups, or both checks and fixups. Each check includes one or more property statements that validate the PDF content. Preflight shows an error only if all the property statements in the check are in error. In the Preflight Edit Profile dialog box, you can specify which values to use and how to handle mismatches. For example, you can choose a profile that simply reports mismatches, or one that automatically fixes a mismatch according to its specified parameters. A profile with a fixup has the filled-in gray wrench icon next to it.

Adobe Acrobat includes several predefined preflight profiles, organized into groups, such as Digital Printing, PDF Analysis, Prepress, and PDF/A, PDF/E, or PDF/X Compliance. You can use the predefined profiles as is or modify them to create custom profiles. The checks that make up the profiles (called rules in previous versions of Acrobat) are organized by categories, such as Document, Pages, Images, and so on. Each check in a category governs a particular document property.

To help you determine what document properties the preflight profile analyzes, you can review information about each selected check in the Preflight Edit Profile dialog box. This information describes what criteria the check uses to analyze, and possibly fix, a document property.

View profiles

Set up favorite profiles

Preflight Edit Profile dialog box overview

The Preflight Edit Profile dialog box lists all available profiles and shows which document properties are being analyzed. From this dialog box, you can unlock and lock a profile, create a new group for organizing profiles, and specify inspection criteria. You can access additional options and information by expanding the profile.

To open the Preflight Edit Profile dialog box, expand a profile group in the Preflight dialog box, select a profile, and click Edit (or choose Edit Profiles from the Options menu).

Add and remove profiles

You can create your own custom preflight profiles. Before you create a new profile from scratch, review existing profiles for ones that achieve results similar to those you want. If possible, duplicate an existing profile and modify only the relevant portion.

A preflight profile must contain at least one check or fix and one property that validate the PDF content. When you build a check from scratch, you can use existing properties or create new properties as you go. For best results when creating and modifying profiles, add only as many checks as you need to validate the PDF content, and keep the checks and properties simple and straightforward. For example, you can use a PDF/X profile to check for certain criteria, and then add checks for non-PDF/X criteria, such as image resolution.

Create a profile

Duplicate a profile

Create a profile group

Remove a profile

Import or export preflight profiles

Preflight profiles can be shared with other users. For example, print service providers can provide them to their customers to ensure that jobs pass an inspection defined by those profiles before the jobs are handed off. Users in a workgroup can create their own profiles as a way to check a document before uploading to the web or printing to a special printer, or to check in-house production.

To exchange a profile, you package it for import and export. The package includes all checks and properties for the selected profile.

Import a preflight profile

Export a preflight profile

Lock, unlock, and password-protect profiles

You can prevent unauthorized changes to preflight profiles by locking profiles and giving them passwords. This may be useful if preflight profiles are shared among several users. You can lock or password-protect preflight profiles when you first create them or any time you save the preflight profiles. By default, all predefined preflight profiles are locked.

Lock a profile

Password protect a profile

Unlock or unprotect a profile

Change profile settings

You can change the settings of a single profile.

Change general profile settings

Modify existing check and alert settings

Preflight alert options

For each check in a profile, you specify how to handle mismatches during the inspection. You can select from the menu next to each alert icon. The icon for the alert appears next to the check in the Preflight dialog box.

Generates an error message for this check (or any checks in this category). Choose this option for mismatches that you must correct before proceeding to the next stage in the workflow.

Generates a warning message for this check (or any checks in this category). Choose this option for mismatches that you want to know about and may need to correct before final output.

Generates a simple note for this check (or any checks in this category). Choose this option for mismatches that you want to know about but do not need to correct before final output.

Never generates an alert message for this check (or any checks in this category). Choose this option for mismatches that will not affect the output quality of the PDF document. You must change the state from Inactive to any other state to make the text boxes available.

View a profile summary

You can view a description of each check and its inspection criteria for a given profile by creating a profile summary.