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

Learn to identify and resolve common issues like missing fonts, modified images, text formatting, and more to ensure your documents display as intended.

Published August 10, 2023

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00:01

Introduction

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.

00:20

Performing basic document checks before export

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,

00:47

Identifying and fixing common file issues

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,

01:49

Using the preflight panel to detect errors

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,

02:56

Fixing missing links and overset text

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.

03:18

Creating and using custom preflight profiles

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.

What you learned: Common factors that affect appearance and how to use the Preflight panel to identify potential issues

Top issues to check for

Before sharing or printing your document, take a moment to ensure it is error free. That means no missing fonts, missing or modified images, spelling errors, hidden text, and more.

Checklist for avoiding common issues:

Check your spelling! To spellcheck your document, choose Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling.
Make sure your images aren’t missing or modified in the Links panel (Window > Links).
Check for missing fonts. When you first open a document you will be alerted to missing fonts. Get those fixed so the text looks the way you intended.
Make sure all of the text is visible.

Use Preflight to automate error checking

You can also let InDesign automate the bulk of those checks for you using the Preflight panel. As you work, InDesign can check your document for issues in the background. Here’s how it works:

In the status bar, below the document, with Preflight on (by default), you’ll see a green or red circle. Green is good, red means issues. InDesign checks for basic issues defined in a preflight profile.
If you see red, to see the issues, click the arrow to the right of the error message (green or red circle and message) and choose Preflight Panel (or choose Window > Output > Preflight).
In the Preflight panel, click page numbers to see where issues are and fix them in the document manually.
You can choose what is checked in the document by choosing Define Profiles in the previous menu. Create a new profile and select errors to check for.

Tips for using Preflight

Change the preflight profile that InDesign uses to check for errors from the menu at the top of the Preflight panel or in the Status bar below the document.

Embed a preflight profile in the document so others can use it! In the Preflight panel, click Embed Selected Profile to embed it. You can’t embed the default profile since everyone already has it in their version of InDesign.

Adobe Stock contributors: adogslifephoto; ink drop; Wavebreak Media
Presenter: Brian Wood

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