InDesign - exporting to standards- 2 part question

[Stephanie I Am]

Good morning! I have been exporting and then doing an accesibility check on a PDF before uploading to a website. However, I'm guessing much of this could be done in INDD before exporting to a PDF. I am not finding that information- if someone could direct me to that I would be super appreciative.

#2- More complicated perhaps...

Wihtin my work I have several Brand Standards I need to make sure everything adheres too... is there a way to create a custom Pre-flight that will catch these brand standards? That is assuming I could go into a pre-flight mode and tell it I want it to always look for hyphens, orphans, dashes, certain kerning or tracking... times that appear out of a set format, etc. Right now I am going in and setting paragraph styles (those should be correct) and then running an Find/Replace situation for things like the "-" dashe that really should be an en dash... seems like a pre-flight situation would be faster and easier. 

I might be thinking about this all wrong so I am open to any and all input and suggestions!

[Derek Cross]

Linkedin Learning has an online video tutorial on creating accessible PDFs (you can get 30-days free access):

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/creating-accessible-pdfs?trk=learning-serp_learning_search-card&up...

You can customise your Preflight, though I don't know whether you can cover all your points – there are presets in Find/Change for changing hyphens to en dashes etc. Maybe Paragraph Styles might cover things tracking.

[Stephanie I Am]

Thank you. I will check out the link and the Paragraph styles/ F/C is what I have been doing, but I do love efficiency so I was thinking I could kill a couple birds iwth an automated stone! 🙂 

[Scott Falkner]

Brand standards usually are rules about how a logo is to be displayed, such as which version (colour, black, reverse) to use on which background, how the company name should be aligned with the logo, how much space around the logo is required, etc. These cannot be caught by preflight. About the only thing preflight can do is tell you where a solid colour or RGB version of the logo is used. If the logo is placed you can search the Links panel for the logo (sort by filename) then manually check each use.

[Stephanie I Am]

Scott-

Yes, we do have those logo / white space/ sizing etc rules too. I was just hoping to automate some of the things that are easy to miss- darn dash vs en or em dash... 🙂 We have a 150 pg document of brand standards and there are so many rules it can bea easy to miss one, so I was thinking a pre-flight option would catch my mistake on a lazy day!

It is almost always text based things that get me into editing trouble later on! For some reason I'm freakish about the graphics and get forgetful of rule #122 subset a) when used on the the First Day of winter when changing lattitude while traveling on an astroid going the speed of a triangle the color of purple.... that kinda rule you never use kinda thing! 🙂 

[Derek Cross · Accepted solution]

Changing the tracking in Paragraph Styles and the presets in the Find/Change dialogue box.

[Stephanie I Am]

Thanks. THat is what I do now, and have set up some GREP stuff, but of course just looking to automate as much as possible. The idea being in the end running a pre-flight to catch something instead of multiple F/C items. 🙂 

[BobLevine]

You might want to look into Em Software's WordsFlow which maintains a two-way link with placed Word files.