From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Packaging and preflight for output - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Packaging and preflight for output

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- [Instructor] In an earlier chapter, I discussed how InDesign documents don't embed all of your placed images. Rather, they just link to the original files on disk. Well, that means if you're going to archive your document or you want to send it to someone else to edit or print, then you need to collect all of your linked files too. Fortunately, you don't have to go and find and copy all of those files manually. Instead, all you need to do is go to the file menu and choose Package. Oh, but wait. Before I do that, I just noticed something. Look down here at the bottom of the document window. See that red dot? That's a stop sign. That means there might be something wrong with this document. To see what it's alerting us about, let's click the little pop-up menu next to it and choose Preflight panel. Here inside this panel, you can see there is a text error, and if you click that little twirly triangle next to it, you can see, oh, there's overset text. Then I'll click this triangle and I can see there's a text frame that's overset on page 25. That number is also a hyperlink, so I can click it and InDesign jumps to the page and selects the offending text frame. Let's move this out of the way so we can see what's going on. There it is. There's the text frame that's overset. Now this is easy to fix. I'll just make it a little bit taller. There we go. Now the error disappears from the preflight panel and we see a green light in the panel and down at the bottom of the screen. The Preflight panel is super useful for checking all kinds of potential problems in your files, but now that we see the green light, we're good to go. I'll head back up to the file menu and I'll choose package. When you choose Package, InDesign immediately shows you a summary of your document. While this is kind of helpful to give you a sense of what's in here, it sometimes alerts you about stuff that you don't really need to worry about. Like it says, I have RGB images in here, and that's not a big deal in most situations though, I guess it's nice to know. I usually just ignore all of this and I go ahead and click Package. If your file hasn't been saved, InDesign will ask you to save it. Then it'll ask, what do you want to name the package folder? By default, it names it based on the name of the file itself, and it asks you where you want to put it. I'm just going to put mine on my desktop. Then down here it's asking, what do you want to save? And this is important. Generally, you do want to copy both the fonts and the linked graphics, and actually I should clarify something. Turning on this Copy Fonts checkbox will collect all of your fonts except for the ones from your Creative Cloud, Adobe Font subscription, what some people still call type kit fonts. InDesign will not package those. The idea is that anyone you're sending an InDesign file to is also going to have the Creative Cloud, so they'll have access to all the same fonts you do, so they don't really need you to send those fonts. However, this could be an issue if you're packaging for archival purposes, so it's important to know about. Now, down here, there are two more check boxes that you should think about. First, Include IDML. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, IDML is InDesign's way of letting you open your file in an earlier version. For example, if there's any chance that someone will need to open your file in say, InDesign CS6, then the IDML file would let them do that. Of course, it might not end up looking exactly the same, so be careful with that. The Include PDF checkbox can also be really helpful. This exports a PDF and puts it in the same folder as the InDesign file. I think of this like insurance, kind of like saying, "Here's how my document looked when I packaged it." Of course, turning these check boxes on adds to the time it takes to package the file because you know it takes time to export PDF and IDML files. If you have a huge file, that could slow you down, but for most files it's not that big of a deal. Finally, I'm going to click the package button down here. When I do that, InDesign alerts me, "Hey, watch out. You're saving fonts into the folder. Make sure you have the rights to do that." Now, I'm not a lawyer and I know you cannot give your fonts to someone who doesn't have the right to use them, but if you're sending this to an output provider and all they're doing is printing your document, then it's typically fine. Check your font license to be sure though. Let's go ahead and click OK. Now, InDesign copies the document and all of the graphics and fonts, and plus that IDML version of the file and the PDF, and it puts it all into a folder on the desktop. Let's go take a look. There's the folder. I'll double click on it, and inside you'll see there's the InDesign file, the PDF, the IDML, and a links folder that shows all the images that were inside that document. Also, in some situations you might find a folder here called document fonts. That's where all the fonts would go, but if all your fonts are from Creative Cloud like ours are, then you won't see that. Now, I mentioned earlier that one reason to use the package feature is for archiving your file because it collects all of your images into one place. But if you're doing this, beware of one thing. The package feature will not grab any images that are hiding on the pasteboard. It only takes linked images that are on your pages themselves. Other than that, it's a great help.

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