What's new
The bigger changes in Preflighter.app, newest first. Small fixes aren't listed one by one.
October 2026
- Every PDF/X problem at once. Besides transparency, the PDF/X row now flags RGB colours in PDF/X-1a, a missing output intent and a missing Trapped flag. The report for your printer lists all of them, not just the first.
- PDF/X-1a and X-3 with transparency. These standards don't allow live transparency, and printers send such files back. The PDF/X row in the checklist now warns when a file declares one of them but still contains transparency.
September 2026
- Privacy page in all seven languages. It says what is stored and for how long. PDFs attached to a bug report are now deleted automatically after 12 months.
- Same colours on every screen. On wide-gamut displays in Firefox, separations looked more saturated than the overprint preview. Both views now match.
- Spot colours from Affinity exports. PDF 1.4–2.0 files exported from Affinity could lose spot colours used in gradients, and some spot colours showed the wrong colour at 100 % tint. Both are fixed, and overprint over semi-transparent ink now matches what you see in Acrobat.
- Sample file. No PDF at hand? Open a sample PDF/X-3 file with ten spot colours, printer's marks and a bleed.
- Overprint preview keeps spot colours in gradients. Separations and overprint preview now always show the same ink.
- Transparent background. A checkerboard behind the plates shows white ink and spot varnish, which are invisible on white paper.
- Page box outlines on by default, so bleed and trim are visible straight away. Spot colours in the checklist are now counted across all pages, not just the current one. Transparency moved from the warnings to a note, because almost every healthy PDF/X-4 file has it.
- Tested against the Ghent PDF Output Suite 5.03, the industry test file for print output. Each patch was checked against a reference render.
- Security update of the PDF renderer (CVE-2026-10118).
- Italian, a new look, and sizes in inches as well as millimetres in English.
- Preflight checklist. One panel sums up bleed, trim size, page consistency, image resolution, embedded fonts, PDF/X, output intent, colour space, spot colours and overprint. A check that hasn't been verified on every page says so instead of showing a green tick. You can download the result as a report.
- Clearer spot colour warnings. When a spot plate is missing, the tool tells you whether it's a limit of the tool or a problem in your file.
August 2026
- “This document is RGB, not CMYK.” A clear warning for files exported from Canva, Word or Figma that contain no print colours at all.
July 2026
- Up to 16 spot colours instead of 4, and a warning naming the spot colours that couldn't be shown. Spot colours in separations now use the document's colour profile, so Pantone areas look the same as in the overprint preview.
- Printer's marks in every plate. Crop marks and registration crosses drawn in Registration colour were missing from the separations.
- Pure black stays pure black. A K100 logo in a file with an embedded CMYK profile was shown as rich black.
- Sharp at any size. The resolution now adapts to the page: a billboard opens in about a second and a business card is no longer blurry. Page size is shown in millimetres.
- Attach the PDF to a bug report, so the bug can be reproduced. Plus fixes for an upload stuck at 100 % in Firefox and for switching languages.
- Polish, German, French and Spanish. Upload limit raised to 100 MB.
- Launch. Separations, overprint preview, total area coverage (TAC), ink densitometer, page boxes, fonts, images and metadata, output intent from the PDF, zoom and pan. In English and Czech.
Missing something? Open the tool and use “Write to me” at the top.