InDesign Preflight Erros

[Cosmic Owlet]

I'm currently working on a school project where we're creating a magazine design, and we're in the stage of ensuring it's preflight-ready before going to print. I've incorporated some cool Appearance effects like overlay and multiply. However, my preflight tool is flagging them as errors, citing 'transparency' as the issue.

I'm a bit puzzled as to why this is a problem. I intentionally used transparency effects for aesthetic reasons, and when I printed a simplified version on a school printer, everything looked fine. So, why the error message? Should we designers avoid using these effects altogether?

[Frans v.d. Geest · Accepted solution]

What kind of 'warnings' you get depends on what you have defined as 'to be warned for' in a certain Preflight profile. It seems that you have ticked 'transparency' on in that profile. Some users like to be 'warned' for this as it can introduce colour shifts etc. or sometimes it may not be allowed.

[Willi Adelberger]

Not every preflight marker is an error. Some are only for attention. E.g. if you use RGB images, what should be done, those get a marker, but are not an error. Show us a screenshot of the preflight window.

[Cosmic Owlet]

I've noticed that the preflight process we've been advised to follow at school checks everything within the Images and Objects. I'm curious if this transparency issue is primarily related to printing concerns 🙂

[Willi Adelberger]

Why do you mark everything?