AI for printing companies, tested first on RFQs your estimators already answered.

The answer is already in the job folder. A customer's request sits beside the estimate your desk wrote from it, and the files as they first arrived sit beside the ticket prepress opened. Your reviewer needs no outside benchmark to judge a draft, only work your own shop has finished, with its corrections and its reprints on record.

The trade's customs tie the price to the spec. The printing trade customs many shops still publish with their terms say a quotation rests on the accuracy of the specifications given, that material not matching them can be re-quoted, and that a quotation left unaccepted for 30 days may change. They also let a delivery run over or under the order by as much as a tenth. A spec line that an estimate got wrong tends to surface again at the ticket, and that is why these two jobs sit side by side.

Some buyers publish how tight a spec can get. The US Government Publishing Office buys printing under written quality terms. Its Quality Assurance Through Attributes Program, GPO Publication 310.1, has five levels chosen job by job, from Level I, with art books, medical journals and meat grading charts as its examples, down to Level V, interoffice forms and line-only handouts. GPO's contract terms also refuse any quantity variation the specifications or the contracting officer haven't authorized, a long way from the customary tolerance. A request can hold you to either, and a draft has to show which one it read.

Mail brings rules that belong to the Postal Service. USPS's Domestic Mail Manual keeps an automation letter between 5 and 11-1/2 inches long and 3-1/2 and 6-1/8 inches high, with length divided by height between 1.3 and 2.5. Someone who writes "8.5 by 5.5, mailed" has raised a trim size and a postage category in one breath. The test lists the mail details a request left open. Whether a piece qualifies stays with your mailing staff, and nothing here is legal or postal advice.

A PDF/X label covers a family of files. ISO 15930 defines PDF/X, the X standing for exchange between print buyers and producers. PDF/X-1a holds a file to CMYK and spot color with no color-managed data, while ISO 15930-7, PDF/X-4, admits color-managed CMYK, gray, RGB and spot data along with transparency. A customer who says the file is PDF/X hasn't yet said which one, and your requirements sheet may welcome only some. The preflight test reads what each file declares and sets it against what your shop asks for.

One limit covers both. The proof of concept stays out of your print management or estimating system, your prepress software and every live job. It neither prices a job nor releases one to the floor. It reads copies, and someone on your staff checks every estimate and every job ticket.