6.1 Preflighting

Hi everyone, as we look to wrap up our magazine, there's a few steps that we need to accomplish first before we get this ready to export out to a final pdf. And these steps ensure that everything that you have going on in your magazine is as good as possible for printing. So I'm talking about preflighting. Now, when it comes to your magazine, preflighting for magazines is really no different than any other publication or print item that you're making. It's just a way to go through all of your pages, all of your content and make sure everything is where it should be. So this step will save you a lot of headaches with your printer in the long run And there's a couple ways that you wanna go through here in preflight. Now this is gonna be my workflow that I'm sharing with you. This is what I do for all of my magazines and all of my print projects before I get them ready to export. If you have InDesign CS6, it comes with this printing and proofing work space that you can switch over to, it gives you a couple extra ways to check your work. If you have an older version of InDesign, it's gonna be over here somewhere in this lower section of your file menu, it's gonna say preflight and then a dialogue box will pop up allowing you to check your document. So what you wanna do is you wanna go through all of your pages first and foremost. You wanna make sure that everything is as it should be. All of your master pages are applied correctly and you have all of your content laid out exactly the way you want to. Now if you have a hundred page magazine, I understand that could take a little bit of time. But it is very important to go through and make sure that you didn't miss anything throughout your project because more than likely you're gonna be designing this over several weeks of time. So I'm checking here, making sure that we ended up with an even number of pages, which we did, and at the beginning when we were looking at having enough spreads, you wanna go through and make sure that you have the right amount for your document. So, real quick, we have a spread here, spread here, spread here, and 12 and 14 is a spread. Great, we don't have a problem with that. It's gonna print just fine. After that, take a trip over to your layers and make sure that everything was laid out exactly the way that she wanted to for your text, your objects, and your photos. The other area that I do check is my links. If you don't see it over here then go ahead and come over to your window and open up those links. You want to make sure that you don't have any startling errors here. As in an exclamation point pointing out that you have an incorrectly linked image. We're good to go here, we don't have any of that. If you do that means that somewhere along the line what your linking to has either been moved or deleted. So you need to relink that down here using these options. You can either update the link if it's just been altered or you can relink that entirely. So you definitely wanna make sure that this isn't illuminated next to any of these photos and that tells you that everything is all right. And you notice here that we hit the prefly option in this links pallet and there's a few text issues. So it's letting us know that we have some overset texts and we also have some missing fonts. So if you go ahead and open those up you notice that there are some font calls here that we don't have. So you need to go through and fix those and make sure that you have all of your fonts linked up correctly otherwise when you save out you're going to have some issues there. For example this is calling up for an italic version which I am assuming does not actually have an italicized version of this font. So we would go through and fix that accordingly. Overset text is letting us know what page this resides on and the neat thing is that it takes you right there. So this is where our problem is, now it says that we have some overset text, but we actually don't everything is showing up as possible. So it's probably just a matter of hitting a few deletes here, and getting rid of those extra spaces. This, we do have an overset problem, and that's okay for tutorial purposes, but if you actually had this in one of your articles, you wanna either bring this frame down until you don't have it anymore, like that, or you need to cut your text a little bit shorter. Same thing is happening on this page, and this page, and this page. And that's just because I used place holder text. You shouldn't have any problems on your end. But that's something you definitely wanna check before you send everything off to print. Okay, so that is just a quick look at how you can check in InDesign before you save out your magazine. this way you are looking and making sure that everything is linked up correctly. All of your images are ready to go and nothing has gone awry during your production process.