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Export Options and Preflight

Lesson 13 from: Adobe InDesign Creative Cloud Starter Kit & Wedding Albums

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

13. Export Options and Preflight

Lesson Info

Export Options and Preflight

Let's go back to our class notes because I believe yes that in my layers I hid a few more extra things for you some bonus things so let's see what that is so in the layers panel the blue layers layer one that's where all this stuff is that's by the way that's why these boxes and these frames are blue because layer one is blue by default indesign color codes things so layer one is blue by default layer two by default is always red so let's turn on what's on layer that read the red layer which I have named contact so you can name your layers just like him photoshopping double click and then you can type it s o to make it visible I'm going to click right here to make the I cons turn on the screen and then let's look down at the bottom I put this in p s s o it says ps wanna sit together at lunch and then it's like p ss come find me on twitter or email me on kids today would be like email whatever right? I don't think they even do that so I don't know I'm a nerd, I'm fine with it well we wa...

nt to do a few more things we're going to create some hyperlinks here so not only is this class no uniform but it's also got hyperlinks so find me on twitter let's just take this little scribble of a bird that I made and let's make it link a ble so we're going to make this a button too so we'll go to buttons and we'll say button and on click the action is go to you are all right so then in this box you type in the early one so www dot twitter dot com flash like if I was going to put my own and be cape lit image great okay then this button's done ready to go the email icon here if we want to make that a button will do the same thing button on click and we'll say go to u r l and you're thinking you are l for email what but yes only instead of typing http something we're going to type this is cody stuff but it's really simple even I can do it so it's male like the word male let's zoom in so you can see male to colin and in the mail address right so like your name at you doc whatever and that's it okay so but what about so now that this little graphic is the button this graphics a button but what if we also want the text to be clickable so we need a hyperlink for the text right? So to do that I'm going to grab the type tool I'm gonna click and highlight it and then I'm going to go to my hyperlinks panel so window interactive hyperlinks and we're going to say make a new hyperlink so the new button that's at the bottom that's the same on every panel that has new things you can add so click that and then we're going to tell it in this case we aren't going to say you earl but you could if you wanted it to be linked to a web page or something in this case will just say email and then we'll type in the address so again your name at you dot com or whatever and here's what I think is so funny is you can actually dictate the subject line that should pre populate in the email so you know it could be like I love you or let's do lunch after all let's sit together at lunch and whole email that to you for the cafeteria awesome um and then we can turn this off here's where character style okay so remember that character styles are different than paragraph styles paragraphs styles air for paragraphs character style there for like single words or whatever so if you wanted teo you could create a new character style which I already have one here and it's in this case I'm called it hyperlink and what that means is it puts an underlying under it I think I forget what it looks like we'll find out typically when I build hyperlink character styles I tell it to turn the text blue so I'm not dictating the font the font is specified by the paragraph style but I'm saying hey within this paragraph style I want something special for this word so I'm not going to dictate the front I'm just going to say I wanted to turn blue and have an underlying or whatever so let's see if I actually did that yes I did look at that so it's blue and it's underlined and then of course they would recognize that that's clickable they would click and it would email them so that's kind of exciting let's export this and will make it interactive pdf yes interactive replace whatever we have now here's the thing automatically here it's going to include all of the all of the interactive stuff if I exported this as a print pdf it can still have hyperlinks so none of the buttons would work or anything like that but the hyperlinks would work but I'd have to turn it on so I'll show you that in a minute but we'll go ahead and click okay going toe do that and then here's our texts and everything and our little radio buttons and then if I click email it's gonna launch my my email and it pops up and says let's do lunch and it's ready to go which I think is so fun s so that's a really basic stuff with this let's see about um if we want to do export something as a regular pdf so let's go back to something like maybe this fruit demo or church yeah that'll be a good one let's go back here right and we'll just make a quick something with some text we'll fill it type filled with placeholder text and let's just say that we want like some phrase in here to be a hyperlink s o if I highlight this and we'll go to our hyperlinks panel which I got open so we'll say new hyperlink and where do we want it to go in this case a girl where do we want it so I don't know we'll send it to google her for whatever reason that's always when I'm not sure of my internet's working I always, um like google does google over right? I'm can't be the only prison mint of that okay, so we're going to have it go to google and appearance I have not created oh, it isn't here okay, there is a hyperlink um character style I forgot I made that so we'll go ahead and say ok, there it is now if I want to export this is a pdf I don't need to get all crazy and make it an interactive pdf because it doesn't have buttons and it doesn't have like any of those features but it does have a hyperlink but we still don't have to so we can make it a regular pdf so go back to file export and we'll just say print print pdf no big thing desktop obviously and then we'll hit save now here's where you got to pay attention because when you make a regular pdf you've got to make sure that you come in here if you have hyperlinks you have to turn it on it's not on my default ever even if you made hyperlinks it doesn't turn on turn itself on the same with bleeds if your document this doesn't have bleeds but if your document did have bleeds when you export to a print pdf you have to make sure you come in here and turn on use document bleed settings you have to ok otherwise they just won't be included and then you you get a call from your printer or you'll have a really expensive reprint job, eh? So we'll go ahead and click export and I don't think I told it to view it so we'll have to go get it ourselves silly all right so let's go to our desktop here it is great and here is our hyperlink and if we click will allow and look at that it goes to google so easy um so even a regular print pdf can actually have some interactivity but only in the form of hyper leaks okay another thing I should point out that I just noticed is when I exported this I didn't tell it what to do about the spreads. So if we look at our pages panel we have facing pages on we have one in two spreads so when I go to export this file export regular print pdf will replace the one that's there um we want to tell it to export spreads that's going to join them together so um we want to do that and if you want to view it afterwards then you would turn on view. Pdf after exporting so because I had pages set it was exporting the left page and a right paige not facing pages so we want to say export spreads and let's view the pdf so we can click export and here it comes and now there side by side okay, so you want to check any time you're exporting whether it's, jpeg or print pdf or interactive pdf or whatever you want to look through the options that air there and just make sure things are set the way you want there are a ton of options so I don't want you to freak out like um the only ones you really have to worry about in the print pdf are pages or spreads and if you want to view it right away sometimes that's nice because you want to check it and other times it's just irritating so you can turn it on or off and you wanna watch your hyperlinks and your bleeds. Those are like the most important things generally at the top of this there are little presets, so they're sort of set settings, if you will, for different types of output. So if you want todo press quality or just a high quality print, the difference is going to be what happens to the images so under press quality, it's going to export at a higher p p ay on dh you can change all of this stuff if we go in here under compression color images it's going to export at three hundred, right? But you could change that or if you change the preset and we just do a high quality print that might change or certainly the smallest file size it's not going to export it three hundred people, so you just want to take a look on dh, make sure that you are getting the settings that you want. Generally speaking, high quality print is a good place to start as far as presets go, okay, let's also talk quickly about our whole preflight business cause if you remember way back in session one, we worked with this wedding album design that I had done and we were talking about how some of these images like this here this one here of their rings this is scaled up to cover a double spread so maybe we're worried about their resolution we saw earlier today that if we click on it it'll highlight in the links panel and it will show me the effective resolution is two hundred and sixteen I'm not too worried about that s so I would be fine with it but if you were worried you could set up that warning from your preflight panel so let's talk about how we do that so you know what kind of warnings to expect on dh you don't panic about things that you maybe don't care about so the preflight panel is found in several different locations and I'm just realizing there we go um down here at the bottom of the screen you'll notice right now that there's a little green light this tells me I have no errors which is really great that's the priest the preflight panel at work so it's literally giving me the green light for this document if I want to open the preflight panel I can click the little arrow right here and pull up pre flight panel I think it's also up here somewhere but I never remember its under output preflight so there you go so either way you can pull up your pre flight panel it's kind of just like just like it sounds it's a pre flight like checklist like before you go make sure you pack your bags accordingly so we want to make sure everything's okay so right now we're using what in design provides that's called the basic working profile so it's going to warn us about things like missing links are messed up images or whatever but maybe we care about that maybe we don't maybe we have higher standards that we want we can make our own profile so right now our choices are basic or digital publishing but we're going to make our own so from the pre flight panel I'm going to click this little menu right here and we can define profiles so click on that and we're going to make a new profile so I'm going to click this little plus sign right here and I'm going to call it my mind profile whatever that means my profile okay now underneath all these crazy drop downs are all the things that we can have it warned us about so we could write a description this is a profile that I use for whatever we can tell it to warn us about missing links that'd be good to know it could warn us about inaccessible you earl you are l's so if we have any hyperlinks that aren't like two broken pages it can warn us ah we can have it warn us about color we can have it warned us about images and objects, so if you're worried about your resolution, this is where you'd want to go. So under images and objects, we could have it warn us about any images we have to turn this on, put a check mark here, then you can activate this stuff, so the minimum resolution weaken, set right here and say, okay, if something drops below three hundred, I want to know about it, so I'll type in three hundred, right here in real life, I wouldn't set it that high, but just for example, will do it so well say, warn me if any color images don't meet this minimum resolution or warn me if the resolution is so high that it's, you know, silly, you could do that to my favorite thing actually is not about resolution it's about non proportional scaling of objects, so if you're scaling something and like, I love my tablet, but like I told you, sometimes I bump, I get goofy with it, so if I accidentally squish an image or stretch it or whatever, so that it's a non proportional, I would want to know, right? So I can tell it warned me if I've scaled something non proportionately on dh that's about it under text. It always will warn you about over set text, which just means if you have more text than fits in a type box it's gonna warn you I usually ignore that all the time because I sometimes I have like empty returns and a tight box or I don't know so I get this warning all the time if you are missing a font it can warn you that's nice to know um you know, you can just kind of look through here and see for yourself, but now that we've set everything, the main thing I'm going to show you is the resolution so I'm going to go ahead and save this profile so I've called it my profile will click okay and now we need to turn it on we need to activate that profile because right now preflight is running a check list but it's not the checklist we just made it's the basic checklist so that checklist is called a profile we want to tell it to run the profile we just made so I'll click the profile dropped down and choose my profile on now we have errors that's when you get mad and you're like you know what the other profile was just fine thank you very much so let's see what these errors our it's telling us we have image and object errors and there's four of them okay so let's on we can see this at the bottom two so even if we didn't have this preflight window open I could visually just see at a glance oh hey something's not right I've got some errors so we'll go we'll open it from the window manu this time output pre flight okay so let's figure out what these errors are so I'm gonna drop this down drop this down and it even will tell me the four images that I don't have a resolution of three hundred and it shows me the page that they're on so that's really handy I can click and go right to it and look at that it's another full spread image so then I might be thinking okay but what is the resolution so I'll look over in my links panel and I'm like oh one seventy three that's like close but I still don't think I do worry about it so I could decide whether I want to replace it with a different image or maybe I want to scale it down or maybe I don't care right so the point is that your little pre flight panel you can create your own profiles so you're making your own checklist that you want the preflight panel to um look at for you so it's it's got your back all the time I wouldn't set the resolution that high so you know I want to edit this so I would go into my profiles and I would change that personally so maybe I would drop this down to like one fifty and then if I click okay oh there's just went away love that right so it just depends what your needs are what your output is you know some things printed on or manufactured in certain ways looked great at one fifty somethings I have to be a minimum of two hundred or whatever so I'm not going to pretend to tell you exactly what you need for your vendor in your project but just know that you can manage all of those things in the pre flight panel is this one of those preference is that you should set ahead of time when there's no document open or will it save it and weston know this you can just set it saved that I think in your like in design some like the software so it should be able to read that profile not just this document but everywhere um that's a good question I don't know that I've tested it let's see let's close this I guess we'll save it so that makes sense we'll save this document so I'm just credit president command steve because this is just a regular dot I nd d file um so we'll just close that out and let's see if we open our pre flight how put preflight is it up here profiles so I guess we could just check right here yeah, it's there. So that's going to be there all the time? Um, I've always just done everything with my documents close, so I was, like, cover all my bases, but yeah, that's, really great, so you can actually just make it here in it'll. It's, your profile, kind of like a fun, is just on your system. So it's going to go everywhere but that's, really handy. And I know people feel at ease when they know they're in charge of their own resolution.

Class Materials

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Practice Files
Resource Guide
Adobeland Wallpaper
Adobe® Creative Apps Starter Kit

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Khara is adorable and teaches with such a simple approach which makes learning fun. Her constant smile and infectious laugh makes learning fun. Thank you Khara and creativeLIVE for offering this awesome class on InDesign.

user 3b7cd3
 

I personally love the way she talks, and I am 57 years old, so it isn't because I'm a teen. I think she is fun, light, and funny, and makes listening and learning a pleasure. I have listened to some classes where I was about to fall asleep and it was hard to keep interested, not due to content but the presenter's demeanor. Having great information and learning is what I'm most concerned about. I guess to each his own, right?

kasmath
 

I love Khara's classes! She is fun and informative and packs so much information in every class! I have learned so much about InDesign and Photography and Wedding Albums from Khara and appreciate how hard she must work to bring these classes to us that give us so many more tools to work with! I would highly recommend all of her classes and look forward to owning more!

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