Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
So, today what we're going to do is we are going to show you how we can use the Preflight features in InDesign and also in Adobe Acrobat, too. And there's a lot of interesting things that get into the crossover realm between the two. And I think a lot of people don't realize what you can do when you get a PDF without receiving a native file, what you can actually do to a PDF to actually clean things up. Find out what's going on onside there and actually fixing a lot of issues when you don't have the native file. And the reason why we're doing it both in InDesign and in Acrobat is because in today's world, actually handing off native files is not something that we normally do. We normally send PDFs locally or around the world and you don't want to have to worry about the native applications and making sure all the images and links and everything are there. You want a PDF, but you wanna make sure this PDF is dialed in and, if any changes need to be made, we're going to show you how to do...
that. So, I'm gonna start off today with the Preflight features in In Design. We've got some basic layouts here and these are a couple of my students' work that we asked them to do. So, this is Kate's right here and this is Nina's. And we're going to just run through and we're going to see how everything was put together. And this is what I do when I'm looking through artwork and finding out what's going on. So, if you're well versed in InDesign, most of the things that you go through, you do the standard boiler plate things. Do you have your live trim and bleed setup? Is all of your copy in there? Have you gone through and done your spellchecking to make sure that everything is good? Are there any overset text boxes? Are all your links active? Just some basic stuff. But, how do you know that you've actually built the file well? Not only just from the basic appearance of the standard boiler plate items that you look for, but deep down how do you know if things are actually working correctly? Well, that's where the Preflight comes in. So, at the bottom of your screen, this particular one we have setup and it says there are three errors in the file. I don't see any errors in the file right off. Well, I do, but I put them there to make sure we have some problems with this file. By default, InDesign is always gonna run the Preflight document. Everytime you're working, it's always checking everything that you're doing. And this can slow down some of your files a little bit, especially when you do extremely large files. But,in this case, keeping it enabled all the time just let's you know when something isn't quite right. Well, we have the standard Preflight set-up and if we wanna see what that is, we can go and click on the drop-down menu next to this, choose our Preflight panel and our Preflight panel tells us that there's three issues. One, we have some overset text. Pretty standard stuff. And, so I open up the little twirlies. Get down to-,it says I have a text frame and it's on page two. I can click on this link. It's gonna bring me right to it. It's gonna show me where it is. But, I need to know what to do with this. At the bottom of the Preflight panel, we have our Info pane, and we click that twirly to open it, and it says that this text container is overset by 20 characters. Here's how we fix it. In this case, I can just go in. Quick and easy fix. Select the container. Double-click on the bottom center pull-handle and it's going to open it all up. Once these problems are solved, that error goes away. Now, we're missing a couple links here. And this was because it's on a cloud server and I don't have access to the cloud server, but I know that these are missing. And it's like great, everything is fine with this file. Is it? Well, we don't know. Because we haven't really setup anything to check this file more thoroughly.