InDesign

Perform a preflight check

Before printing or handing off the document to a service provider, you can perform a quality check on the document. Preflight is the industry-standard term for this process. The preflight utility warns of problems that may prevent a document or book from imaging as desired, such as missing files or fonts. It also provides helpful information about a document or book, such as the inks it uses, the first page a font appears on, and print settings.

Note: During preflight, InDesign cannot check the ICC profiles, color spaces, or images for placed PDF pages or placed InDesign files.

For a video on preparing files for output, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0089. To view a printing guide for prepress providers (PDF), see www.adobe.com/go/learn_id_prepress_wp.

  1. Do one of the following:

    • For a document, choose File > Preflight.

    • For a book, in the Book panel menu choose Preflight Book or Preflight Selected Documents, depending on whether you want to check the entire book or only specific documents.

      The preflight utility checks content on hidden and nonprinting layers as well. The utility ignores pasteboard items; however, fonts applied to text on the pasteboard are included in the summary.

  2. Using the Summary area in the Preflight dialog box as a guide, check fonts, links, graphics, and other information. An alert icon  indicates problem areas.

    The Summary area also displays the page number of any transparent object in a document, or the number of documents with transparent objects in a book.

  3. To show information for all layers, including those for which Show Layer and Print Layer have been turned off, select Show Data For Hidden And Non-Printing Document Layers on the Summary area.
  4. To list only missing or incomplete fonts, missing or modified links, and RGB graphics, select Show Problems Only on either the Fonts area or the Links And Images area.
  5. Click Report at any time to save the current information in each of the preflight sections to a text file, which you can open in a text editor.