Books > Preflight not working as expected

[MikeTO]

I can't get the Preflight command in the Books panel menu to work as expected. The help page states:

• Preflight—runs preflight checks on the selected chapters' documents or, if none are selected, all chapter documents, and updates Preflight Status icons accordingly.

The preflight status icons are updated only if the chapters are open. If that's all the command is for it seems redundant if live preflighting is enabled. Also, the user would likely want to preflight before printing or exporting and this would mean needing to open all the chapters to do a preflight.

Note that the Book is not marked as modified when I choose the command for the entire book but it is when I choose the command for a selected chapter.

 

 

 

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

If that's all the command is for it seems redundant if live preflighting is enabled.

Not redundant, necessarily. Suppose you have all the chapters open, but you want to focus your Preflight work on a particular subset of the open chapters. In that case you would want the Preflight status to become "green" (OK) when that subset of chapters no longer has any errors.

I do not know if that was the Designer's intent behind that option, but I thought that mentioning one potential workflow might be beneficial to this discussion.

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Not redundant, necessarily. Suppose you have all the chapters open, but you want to focus your Preflight work on a particular subset of the open chapters. In that case you would want the Preflight status to become "green" (OK) when that subset of chapters no longer has any errors.

I do not know if that was the Designer's intent behind that option, but I thought that mentioning one potential workflow might be beneficial to this discussion.

I see your point and I'm starting to believe that it's as designed because if you open a chapter and preflight it so the icon turns green/yellow/red, close the chapter (icon stays green/yellow/red), and choose Preflight from the panel menu, then it turns grey (not preflighted). This implies that Preflight for a closed chapter acknowledges that it's not being checked.

I find this curious if it's as designed because:

• With live preflight on, the panel's Preflight command does nothing for open chapters (because the panel icon updates live) and nothing for closed chapters. Preflight defaults to on so users may be confused by choosing a command that does nothing. I was very confused.
• With live preflight off, the panel's Preflight command works for open chapters but does nothing for closed chapters. I can preflight open chapters better by clicking through the open chapters' tabs with the Preflight panel open.

The Help page doesn't specify that it's limited to open chapters and since the Books feature does all this background synchronization for closed chapters I just assumed that Preflight did it, too. If I was using the Books feature to create a 50-chapter book I'd want a way to Preflight the entire thing at once without opening all 50 chapters.

[NathanC]

Hi @MikeTO,

Thanks for providing detail and a recording demo, I've logged this with the developers as an improvement to the existing functionality to remove the Preflight check limitation so that it can be run on chapters which are not actively open in Pub. As it currently stands it is slightly misleading since the option does indicate it can be run on all chapters whether they're open or not, and that this could be a tedious task to open each chapter particularly on larger books.