Zoom-in Online

This is a great preventative measure against a snowballing effect of errors that can happen if you're not careful. One small type size or margin goof may not be a monumental mistake on a tri-fold brochure, but what if your project is a 400 page catalog? Yipes. Also, you can save Live Preflight profiles to save for later use and to send to other InDesign collaborators.

Using Live Preflight (quoted from travelogue):

Live Preflight is turned on by default for all new documents, and it uses a profile called Basic, which simply checks for missing or modified links, missing fonts, and overset text frames. If any of these conditions exist, the total number of errors in the document appears to the right of a red circle in the document window’s status bar Just open the Preflight Panel, look at the list of culprits, follow the hyperlink to the error itself, and correct it; it's as easy as that.

These are the potential errors that you can set Live Preflight to alert you about:

General
If you are going to share your profile with others, or just want to perform good house keeping, it is really meaningful to give the profile a short description.

Links
• Missing or modified links
• OPI Links (at this point, I am curious to know how many of you still depend on OPI workflows, and why)

Color
• If the required transparency blending space (CMYK or RGB) is not being applied
• If Cyan, Magenta or Yellow Plates are not allowed, and are present; for when you want to be sure that you are effectively producing a 1 color black (or a document with only spot colors)
• If color spaces and modes such as RGB, CMYK, Gray, Lab, Spot Color are not allowed, and are present
• Check the spot color setup of the document: a) limit the maximum number spot colors that are allowed, b) or if the predefined spot color must use Lab values or CMYK equivalents
• Alert of overprinting applied in InDesign
• Alert of overprinting applied to White or [Paper] color
• Alert if color [Registration] has been applied

Images and Objects
• Image resolution (Color image minimum/maximum resolution; Grayscale image minimum/maximum resolution; 1-bit image minimum/maximum resolution)
• If non-proportional scaling has been applied to a placed object (now this rocks!)
• Objects that use transparency
• Alert if ICC profile setting may cause CMYK conversion, or if there are any profile override (with the possibility to exclude images with no embedded profile)
• Layer visibility overrides
• Minimum stroke weight (with the option to also limit the check to strokes with multiple inks or white)
• Interactive elements
• Bleed and trim hazards (with the option to check for objects near the spine)

Text
• Overset text
• Paragraph style and Character Style overrides (with the option to ignore font style overrides / kerning and tracking overrides / language overrides / color overrides)
• Missing fonts
• Missing Glyphs
• Errors detected by Dynamic Spelling
• Font Types that are not allowed (Protected fonts / Bitmap / OpenType CFF / OpenType CFF CID / OpenType TT / TrueType / Type 1 Multiple Master / Type 1 / Type 1 CID / ATC [Adobe Type Composer])
• Non-proportional type scaling (this should always be checked, don't you know that you should never, ever scale type?)
• Minimum Type Size (with the option to limit the check to text with multiple inks or white)
• Out of date cross-references or cross-references that are unresolved (another great new feature in InDesign CS4 are Cross-References)
• Conditional text indicators that will print (yet another great feature in InDesign CS4)

Document
• If page size and orientation settings are not met (with the option to ignore the orientation)
• If the required number of pages is not met
• If there are blank pages in the document (with the option to consider pages empty if they only contain master page items, or if they contain only non printing items)
• If the bleed and slug setup settings are not met in the document (with the options to set maximum/minimum bleed and slug sizes)

This is a new feature from the newly updated InDesign CS4, if you'd like to give it a shot yourself, download the Adobe CS4 trial here.