Essential things to check for before sharing or printing your InDesign document

Before you share your InDesign project whether that's digital or if you print it it's important to check for issues.

That way the document will appear as you intended.

Now in this tutorial, you'll explore a list of things you can check and also how to use the Preflight feature in InDesign.

Here are a few things you can do right away to ensure your document is ready to go.

Check for missing fonts by choosing Type, Find/Replace Font...

You can see any Missing Fonts listed here and you can replace them.

Now if you print or share your document digitally, wherever there are missing fonts, there is sure to be a substitution.

Do a quick spell check.

Sometimes overlooked, it's easy to run a spell check using the Check Spelling... command.

If you do this often enough, you can even train your dictionary to remember and add corrections.

With your document, view it using High Quality Display under View, Display Performance.

Images and graphics are now shown at full quality.

To give you an idea of the difference between Typical Display and High Quality Display, I zoomed into this image and you can see this is Typical Display and here's the image with High Quality Display chosen.

Now if an image is missing, it will look like the typical display version when you print or share it digitally.

Make sure the Typical Display is showing for now.

You can also check in the Links panel too, under the Window menu.

Here you can see all of the images that are linked and see and fix any that are missing or modified.

I would also check for overset text or text that's hidden.

Back in the first page you can see the red plus indicating overset text here.

You might have accidentally resized the text frame, making it too small or changed text formatting options like size and all your text might not be showing.

To reveal it, you can double click the bottom point in the frame.

Now to help you pinpoint any of these issues, InDesign actually has a built-in Preflight feature found down here in the Status bar.

The word Preflight is an industry standard term.

It just means to check your document for issues that might prevent it from displaying or printing properly.

Now as you work in your document by default the Preflight panel will warn you if it detects any problems.

You can see down here that there are a few errors right now.

Red means there are errors and green means it hasn't found any.

Now to see what the errors are, open the Preflight panel by clicking the arrow to the right here.

And first thing in this menu you can turn on and off Preflight here for this document or all of your documents.

Choose Preflight Panel to open it.

In the panel you can see a listing of errors.

Click the arrow to the left of LINKS and then Missing Link.

You can see where the error is located in the document.

Click the page number to show it in the document window.

And with Typical Displays showing you can see this red stop sign indicating it's missing.

Let's fix it.

Click the red icon to search for the image you downloaded in the lesson folder.

Click Open.

And it's fixed.

If you select Text Frame here in the Overset text section, you can see more information about the error by clicking the arrow to the left of Info here.

I love that you can see how many characters are overset or hidden.

To fix the Overset text, click the page number.

Then double click the bottom handle to fit the frame around the text.

You can also tell InDesign what issues you want to check for.

Those issues are stored in a Preflight profile.

You can create your own profile or import a profile someone gives you.

Now to make one choose Define Profiles from the menu down here.

Click the plus to make a new profile and you can name it something like magazine or marketing brochure for instance.

You can now set what to check for.

Maybe you want to check and see if there are any Spot Colors.

You can do that here by setting this to 0.

Or maybe you want to check to make sure your images are a minimum resolution.

You can do that here.

The TEXT category displays errors for things like missing fonts and Overset Text like you've seen.

And the DOCUMENT category, specifies requirements for things like Page Size and Orientation, the Number of Pages, Blank Pages and more.

Once you're finished setting your options, you can click OK.

Choose that Profile down here.

With Preflight turned on, it's always checking your document, so check out the new errors listed in the panel.

You can definitely tailor the Preflight options to do what you want them to, and make sure your document is ready to share or print.