From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Packaging for output and archive - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Packaging for output and archive

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- [Instructor] In an earlier chapter, I discussed how InDesign documents don't embed all 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 somebody 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 those files manually. Instead, just go up to the File menu and choose package. But wait, I just noticed something. Look down here in the lower left corner of the document window, see that red dot? That's a stop sign. That means there might be something wrong with our document. To see what it's alerting us about, let's click the little pop up menu next to it. Now choose pre-flight panel. Here inside this panel, you can see that there's a text error. And you can see what that error is, by clicking the little twirly triangle next to it. Oh, I see. It's an overset text error. Now let's click this triangle. And we can see that it's on a text frame that's on page 25. That's what that number is over here. And that number is also a hyperlink. So if you click on it, it takes you right to that page and selects the offending frame. Let's move this out of the way. There it is. That's the frame that's overset. Now this is easy to fix. Let's simply just make it a little bit taller. There we go. Now the error disappears. And we see a green light in the panel and also down at the bottom of the document window. The Preflight panel is super helpful for checking all kinds of potential problems in your files. I talked about that in much more detail in my title, InDesign: Preflight and Printing. Okay, let's close that panel and head back to the file menu. I'll choose package. And when you do that, InDesign immediately shows you a summary of your document. And while this is kind of helpful to give you a sense of your document, it sometimes alerts you about stuff that you don't really need to worry about. Like here, it tells me that I'm using RGB images. And that's not a big deal in most situations, though, I guess it's nice to know. I usually ignore all of this. And I go right ahead and click package. Now 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, and it lets you choose where to put it. I'm just going to put mine on the desktop. Now 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 graphics. And actually, I should clarify something. Turning on this fonts checkbox, will collect all of your fonts, except for the ones from your creative cloud, Adobe fonts subscription. What, some people call type kit fonts. InDesign won't package those. The idea is that anyone you'd send an InDesign file to is probably also going to have the Creative Cloud, so they'll have access to all the same fonts you do. So you don't really need to send those fonts. That said, this could be an issue for archival purposes. So it's important to know about. 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 a chance that someone will need to open your file in InDesign CS6, then the IDML file would let them do that. Of course, it may not end up looking exactly the same. So be careful with that. The include PDF checkbox can also be really helpful. It exports a PDF and puts it in the same folder as the InDesign file. Again, this is kind of 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 small files, it's not usually a big deal. So finally, let's click the package button. And InDesign alerts me saying, "Hey, watch out, you're saving fonts into this 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. And now InDesign copies a document and all of its graphics and fonts, plus that IDML version of the file, and a PDF and it puts it all into a folder on the desktop. Let's go take a look. Let's switch to the desktop. And there's the folder. Let's double click on that. And inside you'll find a copy of the InDesign file, plus the links folder that has all the images that we used, and also the IDML file and the PDF file. Also, in some situations, you might find a folder in here called document fonts. That's where all the copied fonts go. But if 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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