InDesign Preflight Basics

Choose Your Workspace

InDesign has several pre-defined workspaces. In CS3 and CS4 there's a nicely defined workspace for this project which you can select by choosing Window>Workspace>Printing and Proofing.

This workspace will give you access to most of the panels you'll need to adequately check your document. We'll open the others as needed.

Missing Fonts or links

InDesign will check for problems when opening the file. The two major problems that might show up are missing/modified links or missing fonts.

Fonts

We'll take a look at the missing fonts issue first. When you open the file if you don't have all of the fonts needed, InDesign will warn you and tell you which fonts are missing:

This is usually a show stopper and you'll need to install the fonts. There's no reason to close InDesign. When the missing fonts are installed, they will be recognized almost immediately. However, if you suspect the missing font isn't really needed or you have a suitable replacement, you can click OK.

If the fonts are missing, InDesign will highlight them in pink:

Should you have a replacement font, choose Type>Find Font. The find font dialog will open and you'll see a list of all fonts in the document. Missing fonts will be noted:

Links

When InDesign opens a file it checks to make sure that all externally linked objects are available and that they are in the same state as the last time the file was saved. Should the links be missing or modified, you'll get this message when opening the file:

A modified link indicates that that the file was saved after InDesign saved the document. This is usually a benign error and can be caused by a system clock being off by just a bit or even a daylight saving time change. A missing link is far more serious.

I usually find it easier to say Don't Fix to missing links and let the file open. That way I can get a clear idea of what the problem is. With the file open, let's take a look at the links panel:

The missing link is clearly identified. If you know where that graphic is, click the far left button (relink) on the bottom of the panel and browse to it:

If you don't have the graphics or fonts, you'll need to contact the designer.

Document size and bleeds

I know it sounds silly to a veteran InDesign user, but the first thing you should be checking is to make sure that the document was actually created at the proper size, with bleeds specified and properly used.

The simplest way to do this is to open the document setup dialog box through the File>Document Setup command:

As you can see, the width and height are fine but we don't have any bleed specified here. (note: if you don't see the bleed choices, the Fewer Options button you see in the above screen shot will say More Options. Click it to display the bleed and slug information.)

Fixing the Bleed

Enter .125 for the bleed in any of the fields and hit the tab key. The default for bleed settings is that changing one, changes them all. (note: the icon to the right of the bleed fields shows that this selection is on).

Let's hit okay and see what happens:

The screenshot above is zoomed in to show you just one corner of the document. Notice the red outline. That's a bleed guide generated by InDesign. It acts like any other guide and objects will snap to it.

In this case I have a solid red background and I need it to bleed fully on all four sides. The fix for this is simple. Select the background red frame and drag out the four sides until they snap to the bleed guide.

The Spine

We've been told the spine is to be 1.25". We need an easy way to measure that and InDesign has tool that's designed specifically for the job. Appropriately, it's called the measure tool.

This tool is not visible by default. It can be found "hidden" under the eyedropper tool. To access it, you can use the keyboard shortcut of k (make sure you don't have the type tool active or you'll just type a letter k) or click and hold on the eyedropper tool.

Let's zoom in on the spine. We're going to assume that the designer pulled out guides to indicate the spine and then open the info panel. To make things a bit easier you can drag the info panel next to the spine.

With the shift key held down to constrain the tool to a straight line click on one side of the spine and drag to the other side:

When you drag with the measure tool it will snap to the guides and the info panel will show you the exact distance that you've drawn (notice the D1 measurement). The spine in our document is fine. Time to move on to the next item.

Transparency

The addition of transparency features was revolutionary when they were added to InDesign back at version 2.0. But they came with certain limitations and require certain protocols or you'll wind up with some very unpleasant surprises when your job is printed. This is a lengthy subject and I suggest reading this PDF on the subject.

The most common problem I've seen is when transparency effects, such as drop shadows interact with text. In some instances the affected text will appear bolder than the rest. Now that you know it's a potential problem I'll show you how to spot it and just as importantly, how to fix it.

Open the Flattener Preview panel and select Outlined Text from the drop down menu:

Any text interacting with transparency will be highlighted in red:

The text is highlighted because it's beneath the drop shadow. A potential problem especially on lower resolution devices. There are a couple of things that can be done to fix this. By far the easiest is to select the text frames and right click (control+click on a one button mouse) and from the contextual menu choose Arrange>Bring to Front:

The result:

Note: The best practices for working with files containing transparency call for putting text on its own layer and putting that layer on the top of the stacking order. For more on working with transparency please check out this video.