Identifying bad links when InDesign doesn’t

A recent post “No Links Stinks Methinks” highlighted the issues with cut and pasted objects into InDesign, namely:

• The link would not appear in the links palette;
• The link would not appear missing in the [Basic] preflight; and
• The link could not be edited to fix any prepress issues

The example used in the post was simple enough – one image placed in a one page InDesign file. In this example, it was simple to determine that the image was clearly missing its link as it was the only image there and should have shown up in the links palette.

The article concentrated on the fact that the images had no links, rather than an effective method of finding badly linked images. Looking for images with no links is fine in a small file, but in a large document that has hundreds of pictures such as a school yearbook, finding these “bad links” are much harder – looking for images that don’t appear in the links palette can be time-consuming and prone to error.

Luckily, Rich from Kerntiff Publishing has a free script that behaves in a similar fashion to the links panel but with one exception – it shows links that are bad:

Unfortunately, resolving the link issue is the next problem. But at least knowing where the images appear is half the battle.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have no commercial interests in the script, nor Kerntiff Publishing, and no money changed hands to publish this article.