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Adobe InDesign CC – Advanced Training

Advanced Exporting & Printing Tricks For Adobe InDesign CC

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 69 of 74

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So let's look at some of the things you do at the end, where we're kind of exporting, and printing, and sharing. The first one we're going to do is Packaging. So let's say I need to send this to a colleague, but I need to send the InDesign file along with the fonts, and all the images, or let's say I'm just archiving this, and I want to kind of get everything because the images are all over the place, and I need to bring it back to a single location so I can zip it up, and archive it, or email it.

The easy one, I go to 'File', 'Package'. You ignore the printing instructions because everybody ignores that. And you tell it where you want to put it. So I'm going to put mine on my 'Desktop', 'Indesign Coursework'. I'm going to use everything, including the hidden fonts. I'm going to give it a name, call this one 'Collection 2019 V1'. Kick back, relax. It's going to say, "Do not share the fonts with anybody else because it's illegal." Let's go and have a little look.

So, in my 'Desktop' now, in 'Coursework' I've got a folder, inside that folder if I go inside, you can see everything that I need. There's my InDesign file, there's all the fonts. There is all the images that were linked. It's also created a PDF, makes it easy just to quickly send off or just check what's in the file before opening up InDesign. And then this file here, called the idml. This file is super useful if you're using, say the new fancy version of InDesign, and you're sending it to somebody that's using CS6 or a really old version that can't be updated. They can open up the idml file. Often with no, or maybe a little bit of trouble, depending on what new features you might have used. That might not exist in that older version but most of the times it's perfect. So 'idml's are awesome. What you can do here is, you can just grab this. On a Mac, you right click it, and say 'Compress', and you get a zip file. Nice and easy, email-able, stick it in a Dropbox or send it via WeTransfer. Lots of ways where I can just archive it. So that's packaging.

Another useful thing is, let's say you're doing some printing inside of your office. You want to print it on, say you've got an A3 printer, it's a nice big one, and you want to print pages, and you want to print spreads, then kind of fold it together like a little booklet. Probably you'll know, like with a newspaper, if we pull the pages apart, it's not numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or evenly. When you're folding pages together, groups of them, 1 needs to go with 7, and 7 needs to go with 14, and there's kind of like a weird numbering system. I'm totally guessing about those numbers, by the way. But you can do that yourself in here. It's called Pagination, that's the technical term. Normally it's handled by a printer but if you want to do it yourself, and print your own booklet go to 'File', and, I'll give away a little secret, it's called 'Print Booklet'. In here, let's have a look at the preview. It's going to print this page with the blank page at the back. Let's have a look.

So, 3 goes with 14, all sort of weird stuff happens. 5 needs to go with 12 for this thing to print off on a big printer and for you to be able to fold it into half, and everything to line up properly. You have to go through and pick a printer that actually has the big enough page size. This is the most common one, the '2-up Saddle Stitch'. Saddle Stitch is just a fancy way to say we're going to staple it. If you've got a quote back, and they say, Saddle Stitch-- I remember, when I first learnt that, I was like "Ah, why don't they just say staple?"

One of the other cool things you can do at the end of the document just to make sure everything's going to run right is 'Preflight'. Down here, I'm going to open this up. By default it's on, if yours is not like mine go to the 'Preflight panel' and turn it on. Once on, go to this drop down, and let's go to 'Define Profiles'. What we want to do is create our own Profile, clicking '+'. I'm going to call this 'Dan Prepress Check'. Now, this is great if you're going out to print and you just want to kind of have an automatic checker to go through and do things, so what I'd like to do is, down here, under 'General', there's nothing I need in there. Let's go to 'Links', what I'd like to do is check if there's missing links. Definitely will give me a warning. 'Inaccessible URL links', I've never had a problem with that, I'm just going to ignore it.

Let's say 'Color'. Let's say we're going out, and we can't use RGB because it's going to a CMYK, and they told us it has to be CMYK. So you can go into here and say, 'Color spaces not allowed', and the one that I don't want. Turn this one on, and I say, I can't use 'RGB'. You also might say, I can't use 'Spot Colors'. Well I can, but I can only use a maximum of one. You can run through all the different options to get the things how you need it to be before it goes to print.

Let's look at some of the other ones. Image Resolution, I need 'Image Resolution' to be a minimum of-- 'Color images', it needs to be a minimum of, say '100'. I want to throw you some errors here. Yours might be 300, it might be 72 if it's going out for Digital Print. Work your way through. 'Minimum Stroke Weight', that's the one that caught me out once. I printed a Stroke that was teeny tiny. It was less than that, and it's called a Hairline. I was just scaling it down, and I made it really small, got the print back. And weirdly the lines just kind of rubbed off with your hand. It was so small, and just holding on to the page. You might have a 'Minimum Stroke Weight', 'Text' in here. It's going to give an alarm if there's Overset Text or missing fonts, you might have a minimum Type Size.

Say you're dealing with lots of Terms & Conditions, and your minimum Type Size, you know is '5' for Black Text, for Terms & Conditions, so you can set that goal. And the document, in here, you might be saying you can only deal with US Letter. If you're using Metric numbers you could just say it has to be page sizes of A4 instead of giving me some other random size. All right, anything else in here? Number of pages, you might be printing, and you know, like we did that print booklet. If you're going to do a booklet, you need a minimum of four, and then, multiples of four, you can turn that on now. You can say, 'No Blank Pages', please. Once you've got it how you like. Click 'OK'. And it's not working.

So by default, you define it, then you got to turn it on. And you can see down here, still on 'Basic', saying you got no errors. I'm going to say, I want to go to 'Dans Prepress Check'. Now it's got 12 errors, this is where it gets quite fun. This can happen while you're working rather than just at the end, like we're doing here. Useful for junior designers that might be working with you. You can have that Preflight on, and they can work out their own errors. The way they work out their own errors, if they go to the 'Preflight panel', you can see here, I just have 12 color problems on my one. So, in here I have lots of color spaces of RGB that I can't use. The cool things about it though is, it tells you where. It's telling me I'm using text that's the wrong color, so I can click on it, and it says-- there it is there, it's using RGB color for the pink there. Down the bottom here, where it says 'Info' it tells you how to fix it. So I can't use RGB, it says use a different Color Swatch.

What if I had more errors than this? Turns out I didn't really think about the Image Resolution. I'd turned it down to 100. I should have turned it right up very high so that this thing threw a few more errors for us. But I hope you get what I mean. So you define your Preflight first by going to this arrow here, and saying 'Define Profiles'. Make sure it's on in this Preflight panel, and then make sure you pick it. You can either pick it from this, which is easy, or within here. Up to you.

The last little one is a little Easter egg. This is mainly for the people who came from Quark. I learned Quark at University. What is Quark? Quark was the industry standard when I was studying. It was what InDesign is now. But InDesign came along and totally took over. Why do you care? I'm going to show you this little Easter egg. You'd probably just more than smile if you've never used Quark before. We're going to go to 'File', 'Print'. In the bottom here, go to 'Save Preset' and you need to call it 'Friendly Alien', capitals. It needs to be spelled exactly like that. Click 'OK'. Nothing really happens. I hover my mouse down here. Where do I click it? I can never remember. Click once. It's our Alien friend, from Quark. I used to love it when you could get him to zap letters, remember that, or delete them. So cool. This guy's friendly, he waves, and continues on his journey. Is that super awesome? No. But it's kind of fun if you're a Quark person. Make sure you install it on a colleague's computer, install the preset and then get them to click it. It's awesome.

All right, so that's going to be the end of this video of Exporting and Printing. I will see you in the next video.