147 Using preflight to find common document errors

Okay. Our beautiful new brochure is done. It's all laid out. Let's go ahead and print this guy. I'm going to press > Cmd+P and just click > Print and... Overset text on these pages. That's interesting. Well, I don't think it's important. What? Missing fonts? I have missing font? That's aggravating. Let's just click okay, and... What? Missing links to files? There's some sort of missing image? This is crazy.

How come InDesign won't tell me about these problems as they're happening? Why does it have to wait until I print or export to PDF? Well, if you have ever felt this way too, you may have the same malady that I do which is caused live preflight blindness. Look down here. Six errors. InDesign has had live preflight since CS4 and I think that a lot of us have become so used to seeing a pretty green or red button down here that we don't even see it anymore.

But InDesign is usually, by default, constantly letting us know if we have a few very common errors with our InDesign document. So that we can fix them on the fly before we get to the print, or export to PDF step. So I want to review how that works in this video, and then show you a couple tips that will get you using live preflight even more than before. First, whenever you see a red dot down here, that's trouble. That means there is a problem. And even if you don't want to pay any attention to it yet, at least pay attention to it before you export to PDF or before you print.

And to see what's happening with these six errors, just double click on it. It opens up the preflight panel. Now by default, live preflight is on, meaning it is constantly checking your document based on a certain profile and the one that it's based on is the default profile. Do you see how it has these brackets around it? The basic profile. What is the basic profile check from? Those things that just popped up. It checks for overset text, it checks for missing fonts, and missing links.

Now here you can see that it's missing a link. And if I just twirl this open, it will tell us exactly which link is missing and it has a linked page so I can jump to it and it selects the missing thing. I could've come to the links panel and seen the stop sign here, but I very seldom check the links panel once I have placed everything because I figure well all the links are there because I placed them, but apparently I moved this thing or I renamed it at some point. If you don't know how to fix this error, all you need to do is open up the info section at the bottom and it tell you how to fix it.

Go to the links panel, use the relink button. We have five errors happening with text. We have one instance of overset text. So I'm going to click on this and go to the text frame. If I just select it, it'll tell us that we're overset 208 characters. And there's the fix. If I want to see it, I click on the page number and there is the overset text frame. And then the missing font is apparently, hum, I don't have semi gold. And there's four instances, all of them are on the master page.

Aha, it's the folio number. What's cool about live preflight is that as you fix the problems, then they go away, they get cleared out of here. So you don't have to refresh, rerun it. For example, if we go to the overset text problem, and I just clear out, let's say, an entire section like that. That should do it. Then it goes away. And now we only have five errors. And so on. So you can go through here and fix your problems as you go. Now here's a suggestion, a tip, for using Live Preflight. Don't stick with basic, create a couple preflight things that will help you solve problems that occur to you more often than not.

For example, for me, I have an issue with, in design in that I often end up with images that are too low-res. So let me show you how I can fix that quickly. I'm going to go to the preflight panel menu, go to define profiles, there are already a few existing profiles, different checks like this one called our magazine. Checks for a bunch of different things like color spaces and if registration was used. Text check just has to do with mainly with text, making sure that there's no overset text, but also, if there are any paragraph and character style overrides.

Doesn't care if there's anybody has it. Just looking for overrides and so on. I'm going to make one that just checks for low res images. To do so, I'm just going to click the plus symbol here, and we'll call it check for low res. And I'm going to turn off, just double clicking in these boxes, so they're all empty, all the existing boxes. And then in images and objects, I will twirl open image resolution and let's say that I want to make sure that all of my images are at least 300 pixels per inch. So I'll say 300 And that's all I'm going to do, just change that.

Click okay. Now my preflight still says that I have five errors and it still says five down here. But if I switch to my low res preflight profile, then it switches and it checks for those issues. So I can jump really quickly to these images. Apparently this image is 139. This one is 157. I can jump over there and fix it and clear it out, fix it in Photoshop, whatever it is that I need to do. And that's actually how I use preflight profile and then I recommend a lot of my clients use is to create a few different simple checks for their document and then run through them as you're working to do a quick check for low res and so on.

Because if you try to glam them all into one big profile that I find a lot of people do, like checking for basically everything, you're going to want to use preflight profile. So that's the tip. Don't become blind to the live preflight readout down here. And to make it work even better for you, create a couple very simple profiles that you can check on the fly.