238 See your document in grayscale onscreen

- One of the best things about InDesign is that it can give you a really accurate view of your document, on-screen, without you having to print out a proof. That's because InDesign has a very powerful, color-management engine built in, and that lets you proof colors for all kinds of conditions. I talk about that in great detail in my course, InDesign Insider Training: Color Management, but there's something that's not obvious at all. How can I see my document as though it were being printed on a black-and-white printer, like a laser printer? Well, you can look in the View menu all you want, but you won't find anything that says anything about "View in Black and White" or "View in Grayscale," but it turns out that the solution is pretty easy, and it is inside the View menu.

To get a black-and-white or grayscale view of your document, first, go up here to the Proof Setup submenu and choose Custom. This Customize Proof Condition dialogue box looks kind of scary, but it's really simple. This lets you tell InDesign how you want to preview your document, that is, what output device you want to simulate. Now, the majority of items inside this popup menu are color profiles. They're for color devices. That means they're either CMYK or RGB, but if I scroll way down to the bottom of this list, you'll see these items down here: Dot Gain and Gray Gamma.

These are all different grayscale settings. Now, in my testing, there is typically very little difference between which gray profile you choose. There should be a big difference, but there just isn't, so I typically just choose something like this Dot Gain 15%, and then, you could simulate the paper or black colors down here, but I'm not gonna bother with that. I'm simply going to leave those alone and click OK, and there you go. The whole document previews in grayscale, right on-screen. Now I can turn that off and on by going back to the View menu and turning on or off the Proof Colors checkbox.

There it is in color, and there it is back in black and white. Now, remember, this is not actually changing anything about the document or your files on disk or even how this will print. This is just a preview setting, one that you probably didn't know about before, but now you do.