FLO Media Viewer differentiates itself from other flash viewers by the possibilities for your graphical production workflows. And this is not surprising, since the product was developed as part of DMP FLO Suite.
One of the possibilities for your prepress or production workflows is to use FLO Media Viewer previews for online proofing of our files. You can generate flash versions of a PDF or InDesign document, and send it to your customer (or account manager) for reviewing.
Customizable interface
FLO Media Viewer comes with a highly customizable interface. This means your proofing workflows can be set up depending on the technical background of your end users. In some cases you might want to include visualization of separations (CMYK/PMS), and in other cases you will want a very simplified view for pure content proofing.
 |
|
 |
| Softcover |
|
Separations |
| (Click screenshots to enlarge) |
Content Proofing
And this is what FLO Media Viewer is often used for. End users or customer who are not necessarily interested in the technical issues of Online Proofing. They want to see the file, and make sure there is no incorrect content in it. And using pdfToolbox PDF rendering is more than sufficient for these ends.
Input from external applications
If the Soft Proofing needs to be more accurate, you can set up a workflow which uses an external application to provide input for FLO Media Viewer. Prepress production software like Agfa's Apogee can render a PDF file and provide the viewer with even more accurate results.
Separations
FLO Media Viewer Server Edition can be used to automatically generate separations out of incoming PDF documents (or InDesign files, for that matter). And just as before, these files can also be provided by external applications.
The user can use the separation previews to get information about overprint, image quality, and so on.
 |
|
 |
| CMYK Color separations |
|
CMYK & Pantone Color separations |
| (Click screenshots to enlarge) |
Version comparison
Sending different versions of the same document to your customer? You might want to notify him about what has been changed. You could do this using hotspots (clickable regions inside the viewer). Or maybe you want to let FLO Media Viewer calculate the differences automatically. Using this feature, you can provide your customer with a series of (optional) views on the document:
- New version of the document
- Old version of the document
- New version of the document, with changes highlighted in a customizable color
- Only the changed regions, in a customizable color
 |
|
 |
Old version of the document
|
|
New version of the document
|
 |
|
 |
| Overlay containing differences |
|
Differences |
| (Click screenshots to enlarge) |
Soft Proofing Limitations
Using FLO Media Viewer, you can most likely handle most (if not all) of your online proofing needs. But for specialized proofing workflows, you might want to go to a dedicated proofing solution. Some reasons to do this:
- We use bitmap information, not vector. Of course this can more closesly represent the output in many cases
- We do not guarantee color-accurate proofing
- We are not in the same price-range as decicated proofing products, and you might want to spend your last budgets this year to ensure similar amounts from your management next year