From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using the Print dialog box - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Print dialog box

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- While InDesign can be used for making onscreen interactive files, for most of us, it all comes down to one thing. Can we get this thing to print? And the answer of course is yes. To do that, let's open the file menu and choose print. Up comes the print dialog box, and there are a lot of features in here. I'm not going to cover all of them right now, but I do want to point out the most important ones. The first thing we need to do, of course, is choose the proper printer from the printer popup menu. This lets us tell InDesign where we're going to be printing. Note that if your printer doesn't support Postscript, then you may not have access to some of the features in this dialect box. Okay. Next, you can choose the number of copies and also what page range you want to be printing. We want to print all the pages in our document, but this document is a tri-fold brochure where each panel of the brochure was set up as an individual page, so we can choose whether we want to print these as individual pages or spreads. Right now we're just printing each panel of the brochure as a separate page, and you can see that down here in the lower left corner, that's where we see a print preview. But if I come over here and choose spreads, then that means treat all the pages on each spread as though it were a single page. In this case, that's better, but you can still see that there's a bit of a mismatch in size between the InDesign pages and the paper. That's okay. We'll fix that in a moment. Let's go ahead and click the setup pane. In this list on the left. This is where you can choose a paper size. This means the paper that's actually in the printer, what we're printing on. In this case, I'll choose US letter. Down here, you can tell InDesign to scale the document to fit on the paper, and that might work well if you're just printing a proof, but in this case, I'm going to leave it set to a hundred percent. You can also choose a different orientation here. So for example, I'll click landscape, and now you can see that the spread fits a little bit better onto that paper. Okay, next, let's choose marks and bleeds. If I turn on all printers marks, I'll get crop marks, bleed marks, and all these different kinds of marks around the outside of the page. For this trifold, that would be important, because it includes marks where the page should be folded. Now if you are printing on a larger sheet and you're printing all these marks, I encourage you to come over here and change the offset amount to say something like 12 points. Be sure to increase this because six points in my opinion is just too close to the page. Also, as we saw in an earlier chapter, this file does have objects that bleed off the site of the page, and there's also information on the paste board in the slug area. So normally if we were printing this on a larger sheet of paper, we would need to make sure that we turn on the used document bleed settings and the include slug area checkbox. That way, InDesign will print anything that falls inside the bleed and slug guides, even though later it's going to get trimmed off by whoever is printing this. But today we are just printing this document on our own little desktop printer and all of that stuff won't print. So let's turn this off and that and all of this. Okay, there we go. Now that we're not printing the bleed and marks and all that other stuff, the whole spread fits onto the letter size paper. Now, the last thing I should point out is if your desktop printer has specific features that InDesign doesn't know about, then you should click on the printer button down here at the bottom of the dialect box. You'll see this warning that many of the things in the printer driver dialect box will be overridden by InDesign own print dialect box, but that's fine. I'll click okay. Now, this is the printer driver dialog box, so it's going to look very different on Windows or even different depending on which printer you're using. But this is where you set up your printer specific features. Like if this were a duplex printer, you can turn on two-sided. To close this dialog box, go ahead and click print and it returns you back to InDesign print dialog box. Okay, that's it. As I said, InDesign was made to print to Postscript printers, but if you have a non postscript printer, that's okay. InDesign prints pretty well to those kinds of simple desktop printers too. I think we're good to go. Time to click print.

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