InDesign Preflight

InDesign Preflight tool allows to check if the Document meets the requirements of the printing house. It finds mistakes the designer made and specify the place in Document.

Preflight tool helps the designer to find mistakes himself and correct them before sending the Document to the printing house. This lets to shorten prepress processes in the printing house, because no further corrections are necessary.

We highly recommend to use Preflight before exporting the Document to the PDF.

HOW TO OPEN PREFLIGHT PANEL

There are two ways to run Preflight tool:

  1. In main InDesign menu choose Window → Output → Preflight:
  2. Shortcut combination Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F.

HOW TO LOAD PREFLIGHT PROFILES

Preflight settings can be configured to define which conditions are detected. These Preflight settings are stored in Preflight profiles. The profile can be chosen in box Profile.

There are two default profiles in InDesign – Basic and Digital Printing. None of them is suitable for offset printing. Necessary profile can be created by a designer or downloaded from BALTO web site. In the archive you will be find 5 profiles for different printing conditions:

  • BALTO_print_CMYK – for colorful CMYK printing;
  • BALTO_print_BW – for black and white printing;
  • BALTO_print_CMYK_1_Pantone – for color printing plus one Pantone color;
  • BALTO_print_CMYK_2_Pantone – for color printing plus two Pantone colors;
  • BALTO_print_Black_1_Pantone – for black and white printing plus one Pantone color (generally duplex (Duotone) printing).

To add new profile, choose Define Profiles from the Preflight menu:

To define a new profile please press + (plus) in the pop-up window.

To import profile choose Load Profile from the Preflight Profile menu, then select the file you want to use and press OK:

Loaded profile appears in the profile list window on the left. In order to load more profiles, follow the same steps again. After all profiles are loaded, press OK and Preflight Profiles window will be closed. Now you can use any of loaded profile.

HOW TO PREFLIGHT THE DOCUMENT

To turn on preflighting for the active document, select On option in the upper-left corner of the Preflight panel and choose the profile. If the document contains a lot of images, preflighting can take some time. While preflight is running, you will see note Checking on the down left corner of window.

When checking is finished, the system gives a result on the bottom of window:

– green light and note No errors

– red light, number of errors and errors list.

Errors are grouped according to type. After expanding the group you will see the errors with page number of it. If you click the error, InDesign will open that page and mark the object which contains the error.

If you do not know how to fix the error, you can save error report in PDF and send it to [email protected].