From the course: InDesign Secrets

221 Finding and editing all overset text in a doc - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

221 Finding and editing all overset text in a doc

- One of the most common errors that you'll find with your InDesign documents, are frames with overset text. They're easy to miss and to accidentally print, or send off to the printer, and then suddenly you get your printed document back and there's lines missing, so how can we find those before it gets to that point? Well, in a single page with just one or two oversets, like say in this document, if I make this frame smaller, you'll see the nasty red plus symbol indicating there's an overset here. These are really easy to spot. And by the way, here's a little side tip, if you zoom out, and here I'm pressing Cmd or Ctrl - to zoom out, those control handles remain the same size, so they get pretty obvious. If you have a long document, let's say a trade book, that's mostly text on a white background, this is a great way to spot those overset frames. I'll go back to Fit in Window. The problem is when you have a document that's a little busier, especially if it's on a red background, where these little red plus symbols, which don't change with layer color, or they appear, for example, our friend the Globe Bank brochure, here's a bunch of oversets here. Kind of hard to spot right off the bat. A lot of people just rely on printing or exporting to PDF, and having that function let them know via an alert. For example, if I choose Print, and I just click the Print button, you'll see that we get an alert that says, oh, there's overset text on these pages. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell me where the overset text is, doesn't link there, really all you can do is click Cancel and say okay, well now I know the page numbers. And on page four I might have 50 different frames, which one is overset? It would be great to have a control panel that says like, make the overset frames turn yellow, or put flashing arrows next to them, but no, that's not possible. However, there is another way to skin this cat. If you look at the bottom of this page, where it says three errors, this is Preflight. Live Preflight is running by default on all InDesign documents, and what it's checking for are things like missing images, out of date images, missing fonts, and overset text. To open up the Preflight panel, just double-click right here on this toolbar. Double-click, it opens up, now Preflight is an actual panel that you can include in your Dock or something, but nobody ever does just because it's so easy to open by double-clicking right here. And what it's telling us is that we have three errors in our document, all having to do with text, and they are linked. So I can click page number two, and InDesign will highlight the frame where there's the overset, so you can see it's this address with a plus symbol. And I can drag it, and make the overset go away at some point, there we go, and then Preflight refreshes and says now there's only two problems. And let me try the other one on page two, a-ha, it's this frame. Now this, if you encounter a frame, let me zoom really close, I'm pressing Cmd or Ctrl + to zoom in, if it's difficult for you to edit the overset text, like I don't want to change the size of this frame at all, while it's selected, like when Preflight selects it because you clicked on the number, go to the Edit menu and choose Edit in Story Editor, or press Cmd or Ctrl Y, and there's the frame right there. If I turn on Hidden Characters, then I can see the problem is just this little space character right there. If I delete the space character, let's just bring it right back up, and now that problem's gone, there's no more overset. So I didn't even have to click anywhere in the layout, I fixed the overset just by clicking in Story Editor. And do we have any more problems? Yes, we have one more here on page four. Now I can't even see it, I'm looking throughout the page and I don't see it, so I'm just going to press Cmd or Ctrl, which is Open in Story Editor, and oh, now I recognize it, it's this little tiny text way down here. There's the overset there, and I can go ahead and delete it, or edit it to fit, so I'll just get rid of that, so there we go. I'm fine, I'm sure legal will be fine with that too. So that's the better way to quickly find and correct oversets in your document, is to use our friend, Live Preflight.

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