Pixels to Print: Perfecting the Preflight Panel
August 06, 2020
Have you ever printed or submitted a piece of work only to later notice
that a sentence was cut off, an image printed much more blurry than
expected, a link or font was missing, or an incorrect color setting was
used by mistake? These types of mistakes happen much more often than one
would like, and we can certainly say that we have all been there!
Now what if I told you that InDesign has a way to prevent these
mistakes from happening in the first place, long before submission or
printing. The worry and hassle of remembering to double check
these often-overlooked details can be completely taken away with the
help of a special tool that is known as the preflight panel.
The preflight panel can essentially perform a quality check on your
document while you are working on it to warn you of problems that can
prevent you from printing or outputting as desired. This would
include things like missing files or fonts, low resolution images,
overset text, and much more!
If while working on a project a red light appears on the bottom left of
your document, with “error” next to it (seen in example photo below),
you know that there is a mistake in your document that you may not have
caught. This is InDesign preflighting your document in the
background, searching for and informing you of errors. If you
double click on this red light, the preflight panel pops up with a list
of the specific errors in your document. As seen in this example
below, 8 errors are listed in the preflight panel; one for an overset
text error, which is shown in the textbox on the right page, and 7 for
missing font files, which can be seen by the red highlighted text
throughout the document.
Another great feature of the preflight panel is that if you click on
the line with the error listed, the info area below will tell you
exactly what is wrong (in this case the text is 54 characters overset)
and a solution to fix it. If you click on the page number of where the
error is located, it will also jump you straight to the page and area of
where the error is so that you can make the fix more
efficiently.
InDesign automatically sets the preflight profile to basic, which
covers general errors like missing links and fonts and overset text,
but there is also the option to create your own customized preflight
profile to look for more specific errors that might be more
applicable to your project.
To open the Preflight Profile window, click on the preflight panel
flyout menu, and select “Define Profiles”. Here, you will see
drop down lists of different areas within your document that can be
checked for errors. To create your own Preflight Profile,
click the + button on the bottom left of the window, and check all
of the boxes of specific things that you would want to check for
errors. For example, you can add color errors, such as the use of
registration instead of black, or even image errors, where you can
set a specific minimum or maximum resolution and check for anything
that might be outside of that range.
The possibilities are truly endless with the preflight panel! And while proofreading and double checking your work is always encouraged, the preflight panel helps tremendously with the stress of the possibility of skipping over errors that could make or break your final document. If you aren’t already taking advantage of it, now is your chance to hop on the train of preflight perfection!
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