Preflighting with InDesign (Page 2)

Preflight before you take off

Setting up a document for print on a press isn’t as straight forward as it is to print with your desktop printer. In actual fact, when you print with your desktop printer, you use just a few of the features you need to use to set up your document for an offset printer.

When you print with your desktop printer, most of the times you only need to go to File > Print, specify which pages you want to print and how many copies, maybe change the paper size and orientation and you are done. What I would like you to do now, is to actually open a document and go to File > Print. When the Print window shows up, have a look at it. Note that on the left hand side there is a list of options categories, that is, General, Setup, Marks and Bleeds, etc. Click on General and look at the options that are there. They should be quite easy to understand. Then look click on Setup and look at the options that are there.

When you want to send your work to a printing firm, things start to get a little more complicated. On that note, here is an article from Jacci Howard Bear explaining what you need to give to your printer’s Service Bureau.

Now that you know what you need to give to your printer, how do you check that everything is there and nothing is missing? InDesign CS has a Preflight Option that allows you to see if your are missing anything when before you send your files to the printer.

The Summary Tab

To use InDesign’s Preflight Option go to File > Preflight… InDesign will scan your document and it will then present you the Preflight window, open on the Summary tab (which you will see on the left hand side with other tabs). Have a look at this illustration. (summary.gif). You don’t need to know absolutely everything that window says. The most important things you need to look at follow.

Fonts: InDesign will tell you how many fonts you are using, how many are missing, how many are incomplete and how many are protected. The incomplete fonts are those Type 1 fonts for which you are missing one of the two files that compose them. The protected fonts are those restricted by copyright which won’t allow you to embed them into PDFs or EPS files. If a problem is found with your fonts, close the Preflight window and use the Find Font option to fix the problems. (Link “Find Font option” to the lesson where this is covered.)

Links and Images: InDesign will tell you how many images you have linked to your document, how many have been modified, how many linked images are missing, how many images have been embedded, and how many images use RGB colour space. Modified links are those images which you have placed into InDesign, you modified them later with a graphics program and you have not updated them in the InDesign document. I did not yet explain how to update modified images. Just carry on with this lesson and we will get to that. In the illustration you can see that there is a problem with a link, that is, it the uses RGB colour space.

Colours and Inks: Checks for duplicate spot colours. Let’s say that for some reason you have two spot colours which are identical but have a different file name. InDesign will detect this and will warn you that you will create two plates for two colours that in actual fact are the same, simply because you named those two colours in a different way. But how, could that happen? It can happen when you import graphics with spot colours. Let’s say that you have already designed your document using Pantone 313 C. You then import a graphic which you have done in Photoshop with a spot colour that Photoshop named Pantone 313 CV. The colour is exactly the same, but the name is slightly different. InDesign will spot that, your printer won’t end up creating a plate for Pantone 313C and another one for Pantone 313 CV.

The Fonts Tab

In order to see the Fonts tab of the Preflight window, click on Fonts on the left hand side of the window. You will get something that looks like this illustration.

Figure 1: The Fonts Tab

The illustration is quite self explanatory. One thing I would like you to notice is the Show Problems Only check box. In this example I am using only one font. But when you start putting a magazine together where you can use quite a few fonts, it will make your life easier, because you don’t have to weed out all the different fonts to find out which ones are giving you problems. Notice also the Find Font button which allows you to fix problems with your fonts.

The Links and Images Tab

Figure 2: The Links and Images tab

The next tab is Links and Images. Have a look at the illustration. Here you can see that there is a problem with the image that I have linked as it’s RGB.

This tab needs some explaining, especially in regards to the Current Link/Image section. In this section you first see the filename. Nothing particularly complicated there. Next to the filename you see the Update button. In this illustration it’s greyed out because the image has already been updated. If I made some changes to the image in a graphics software program and I didn’t update it in InDesign afterwards, I could do it here. There is another way to do this and we will get to that later on in this lesson.

Then you have the Link Updated info and the File Last Modified info which go hand in hand with the Update button. In this illustration you can see that thedates are the same, which means that the link is updated.

Then you have the Actual ppi info and the Effective ppi info. This is very important info, because InDesign will not notify you if you have low resolution images, therefore you need to look at these info. You can choose any image from the list above and look at their resolution.

The Actual ppi resolution is that which you set in your graphic program. The image I have used here has a resolution of 300 ppi (which is the recommended resolution for offset printing).

The Effective ppi is what really counts when you print a job. In this case I have placed the image in InDesign and I enlarged it in InDesign. Enlarging an image in InDesign, or in any layout program, will not automatically give your image more pixels. Therefore the more you enlarge your image, the less pixels per inch (ppi) you have. So you can see that the Effective ppi in this example is 250. So effectively I am printing this image at 250 ppi. If you have questions about this, post them in the DTP classroom. This is a reason why you should always resize your graphics in a graphic program and not in a layout program.

The Actual/Effective ppi ratio works also the other way around. If you shrink your picture in the layout program, the Effective ppi will be higher. This will not create problems when you print your job (usually) but it will slow down the RIP process unnecessarily.

To summarize:

• Actual ppi higher than Effective ppi: your image has been enlarged in the layout program. You should try to avoid this and resize your graphic in the graphics program.
• Actual ppi lower than Effective ppi: your image has been shrunk in the layout program. This is acceptable, you don’t necessarily have to do anything, but it’s best if you resize your image in the graphics program.
• • Actual ppi is the same as Effective ppi: your image has not been enlarged nor shrunk in your layout program. This is the optimum scenario and you don’t need to undertake any additional actions.

The Colours and Inks Tabs.

I have already explained this function under The Summary Tab. (please link). Here is how it looks when you have a problem, i.e, two colours which are the same, but use two different names.

Figure 3: The Colours and Inks tab

If you do have this problem, you need to get out of the Preflight window (press Cancel) and then you need to go to your Swatches palette and handle the problem. The use of the Swatches palette is explained in lesson 3.

The Print Settings and External Plug-in Tabs

You might find that you won’t use these two tabs as much as the other 4. The Print Settings Tab is a more detailed summary of all the Print Settings you have used. The info you might want to look at more closely are:

• Printer’s Marks: Tells you whether you are using marks such as crop marks, registration marks, etc; this is particularly useful when you make PDFs or PostScript files
• Bleed: Tells you how much bleed allowance you have set up your document for; again, this is particularly useful for when you make PDFs or PostScript files
• Colour: It tells you whether you are sending to your printer a composite RGB, a composite CMYK, a separated RGB, a separated CMYK, or another type of separation which I don’t want to take up yet. (please link the word “separated” to your definition of colour separations.)
• Send Image Data: It tells you whether you are sending full resolutions images to your printer or not.

I am pointing out these settings in particular, because they are very likely to give you problems if you overlook them and InDesign will not notify you that some of them might be wrong, like it does for fonts, images and inks. This is because it isn’t necessarily wrong not to put bleed in a job, for example, if you are printing to a desktop printer.

Report and Package

One you are satisfied with all the settings you can do two things:

1. Click on Report: InDesign will save a text file with all the settings which you have used; you can view this file in any text editor
2. Click on Package: InDesign will ask you to fill in your contact details in a little form, which will then be saved into a text file. It will then warn you that you are about to copy fonts and therefore you need to check your licence for distribution. Once you click ok, all the image and fonts will be collected in a new folder together with the InDesign document and the text file with your contact information. Your fonts will be put in a folder called (guess what?) Fonts, and your images will be put in a folder called Links. The Package command is also available under the File menu. If you use it without running the Preflight command first, InDesign will run the preflight anyway and will tell you if there are problems. In case there are problems, it will ask you whether you want to view them (and the Preflight window will come up) or if you want to package your files anyway.

Now you are ready finally! Well… almost. There are a few more things to know. The rendez-vous is next How-To Day in two weeks time.

How-To’s Day is a regular Designorati feature in which we give you fresh tutorials across all of Designorati. How-To’s Day happens every other Tuesday.