Your PDFs, cleared for takeoff.
The PDF inspector your print shop wishes you had. 55 checks. 14 fixes. Native macOS. Free forever.
macOS 26+ · Apple Silicon native · No subscription · No account
Preflight is the last line of defence between your file and the press. It catches the things you can't see — RGB images in a CMYK workflow, fonts that forgot to pack their bags, bleed zones thinner than a promise. The stuff that turns a $12,000 print run into very expensive recycling.
Print shops have been doing this for decades. The tools they use cost a fortune. PitStop Pro runs about a grand a year. Acrobat Pro charges monthly for the privilege of inspecting your own files. The free alternatives have the UI of a tax return and the reliability of a weather forecast.
Taxiway does what those tools do — parses every object in your PDF, checks it against a profile, and tells you exactly what's wrong and exactly where. Then it fixes what it can. Automatically.
The entire check engine is open source. The fix system ships with bundled Ghostscript — no external dependencies. The interface was designed by people who actually send files to press. And it costs nothing. Not freemium nothing. Not free-trial nothing. Nothing nothing.
Eight categories of checks — every one built because somebody, somewhere, shipped a bad PDF and ruined somebody's Tuesday.
55 parametric checks across fonts, colour, images, marks, pages, metadata, transparency, and line art. Every threshold is configurable.
Click a failed check. The offending object lights up on the page — images, fonts, annotations, colour spaces. No log files. No guessing.
10 reactive fixes triggered by failures, plus 4 proactive tools available anytime. Convert to CMYK, embed fonts, flatten transparency, add bleed.
10 built-in profiles. Clone any of them, adjust every parameter, import and export as .taxiprofile JSON.
Open-source GenAI metadata scanner. Detects AI-generated image markers and C2PA provenance credentials. The first of its kind.
Full reports in JSON, CSV, and formatted PDF. Every export includes the complete parsed document snapshot. Pick your poison.
Press production to newsprint to archival to "just tell me if this is broken." Or build your own.
● Reactive fixes trigger when checks fail. ● Proactive tools are always available. Queue them up, review, hit apply. Your original is never touched.
The entire preflight engine — parser, checks, profiles, reports — lives in TaxiwayCore, a standalone Swift Package with zero UI dependencies and zero third-party libraries.
Import it into your own tools. Run it on a server. Embed it in CI. Build a competing app — honestly, we'd be flattered.
Pure Swift 6. Sendable throughout. Immutable document model. 524 tests and counting.