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; 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 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 gray wrench icon next to it.
Acrobat includes several predefined preflight profiles, organized into groups, such as Digital Printing, PDF Analysis, Prepress, and PDF/A 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—and thus how to set parameters—you can review information about each selected check in the Edit Profile dialog box. This information describes what criteria the check uses to analyze, and possibly fix, a document property.