From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Printing and exporting a PDF - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Printing and exporting a PDF

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- [Instructor] An InDesign document by itself is fun to look at, but ultimately you're going to want to print it or export it out as a PDF so that other people can view it or print it. But before we print or export this file, let's see how it's going to look by jumping into preview mode. You can do that by pressing the W key on your keyboard, as long as you don't have your text cursor in a text frame, of course. And preview mode is great because it hides all the non-printing objects like guides, and any objects that are hanging off the sides of the page onto the pasteboard get clipped at the page edge. I'll deselect this object here by clicking in a blank area over on the side. So this is what the final page is going to look like when you print it or export it to PDF. You can actually select objects and even work on the document while in preview mode, or you can just press W again and then you're back in normal screen mode. Okay, now everyone knows that to print, you go to the file menu and you choose print, but this dialog box looks different than the print dialog box in most other programs. Now, most of this is pretty self-explanatory. You choose the number of copies you want, what pages, and so on. But notice that we have a list of different panes down the left side here. I'm going to choose the setup pane, and here's how you choose the right paper size for the printer that you're printing to, and of course, things like orientation and scaling. Now, there are some features that you won't be able to find in this print dialog box. For example, if you have a double-sided printer, you won't be able to find those printer-specific features inside here. Instead, you need to go to the printer driver dialect box, and you get there by clicking the printer button down here at the bottom. InDesign gives you a little warning, but you can just click OK. Again, this is the printer driver dialog box, which will obviously look really different on Windows or with a different printer, but it works pretty much the same way. So, for example, I can turn on double-sided here. Then when I click print, I go back to InDesign's print dialog box. Now, in this case, I'm just going to cancel this because I don't really want to print right now. Instead, I want to make a PDF. InDesign lets you export PDFs directly, right out of the program. To do that, go to the file menu and choose export. Then you can name it and choose a format. Notice that there are two different PDF formats in this pop-up menu down here. If your document contains buttons and movies and other interactive objects, then you'll choose interactive, but in most cases, you're just going to choose Adobe PDF print. Then click save, and up comes the export PDF dialogue box. Here's the first thing you should probably do. Choose one of these Adobe PDF presets up at the top. If you're sending this to a commercial printer, for example, you'd probably choose one of the PDFX presets. You really want to check with your printer or whoever you're sending the PDF to to find out what they want. In a later chapter, I go into more detail about the options in this dialogue box, but for now, let's just make one change here. Turn on the view PDF after exporting checkbox, because we want to see how it looks when it's done. Now click the export button and InDesign exports the file and then opens it in Acrobat. So there we go. This looks great. So that's it for our first lesson. I hope you've enjoyed this very fast overview. By now, you know the basics enough to at least make a simple document, maybe get yourself into a little trouble, but now that you've scratched the surface, it's time to take the next steps ahead and really learn InDesign.

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