Tip of the Week: Finding Overset Text With Preflight

This tip was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on June 4, 2015.

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A couple weeks back, I wrote a tip for using the Story Editor to view and edit overset text that you can’t access in the layout. But what if you need to locate the overset text first because you’re working with an especially long or complex layout?

In that case, InDesign’s Preflight panel is your friend.And you don’t even have to go to the trouble of creating a custom preflight profile. The default [Basic] preflight profile will flag overset text as an error.Just look at the bottom of the document window. If Preflight is off, use the menu to turn it on (select either Preflight Document or Enable Preflight for All Documents).20150604-totw2

After a pause you’ll see the preflight status off the document. If errors were found, a red dot appears. Double-click the word “error” next to the red dot to open the Preflight panel.

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If there are problems with overset text, they’ll be listed under the TEXT category. Click on the small triangles to reveal the exact instances of overset. Then click on a page number to jump to a specific overset text frame.

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The frame will be selected and you can immediately press Command+Y (Mac) or Ctrl+Y (Windows) to open the Story Editor and see/edit the overset text.

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This article was last modified on July 25, 2019

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