Since Adobe InDesign CS4, a great feature called the Preflight Panel was introduced. Essentially behaving as a prepress operator looking over your work, it can alert artists to issues which may be overlooked or not considered.

And in my opinion, it does a great job… if it’s on.

There are two drawbacks to the panel which may mislead new users into thinking that their files are fine, but in actual fact have issues which may arise later:

1) the panel is not on.

Easy enough to rectify, turn it on by going to the Window/Output/Preflight menu (or double-click it open at the bottom of the screen, just to the left of the scroll-bars at the bottom).

2) the profile is set to [Basic]

The preflight which ships with Adobe InDesign doesn’t really do a whole lot. For it to be effective, it has to be looking for as many issues as it possibly can. Yes, profiles can be added and changed, but unless changed when no documents are open, the default preflight will be used whenever a new document is created unless it is changed by the artist.

My first suggestion would be to load some decent profiles onto the machine. Click on this link here to download a fantastic set of preflight profiles (plus install instructions, etc) created by VIGC in Belgium.

The next suggestion is to make sure that a decent profile is made as a default, so that whenever a new file is created, it automatically becomes the default profile rather than [Basic].

To do this:

1. Launch Adobe InDesign but don’t open any files.
2. Open the preflight panel by going to the Window/Output/Preflight menu (or double-click it open at the bottom of the screen, just to the left of the scroll-bars at the bottom).
3. Once the panel is on, make sure the tick-box is checked On. Then, click the flyout button in the top right hand corner of the preflight panel and select the Preflight Options…
4. A new dialog box will appear. In the top dropdown field which appears, select the preflight profile which you would always like to have open on any new files.
5. If you want to use that profile on any document which is opened from now on, click the Radio button titled Use Working Profile. If not, leave this bit alone.