How best to preview your work in Adobe InDesign.

So, while we've been working, we've been just ignoring these blue lines, and these little linking icons. There's lots of blue lines around the edges of the boxes, and that can be a real pain when you're trying to align things up. Just doesn't look very nice.

So, the quick and easy way to preview and turn all that off is the W key. The W key on your keyboard, next to Q and E. But for that to work, you need to be on the 'black arrow'. If you're in the 'Type' tool, you're just going to type a W. So be on the 'black arrow', hit 'W' on your keyboard. Ah, look at that, blue lines gone. You get a feel of a bit of this space around. You can still work in this view, you can see, I can click on it, drag it around, and there's nothing stopping you work like this, except, sometimes it is easy to see all the blue lines.

The other thing that might throw you off your feet, if you try and work in this view, so I'm going to hit 'W' to go back out. Watch this, if I start typing something, and I go-- Remember, we tap on the outside to not join them up, and we start typing. Watch this, if I go to my 'black arrow' and deselect off, hit 'W', wow, it's gone. It's still there, just 'W' kind of hides all of that stuff. So that can be one of the things to note. If anything starts disappearing in this gray area it's probably you just got to type W again.

The other thing it does, you see, the 'Bleed' - I'll zoom in - If I hit W, can you see, the 'Bleed' gets trimmed off. To give you more of a view, of say this border. Because it's going to get trimmed off in the bin, remember. So cuts that off. I type W all the time. The problem with W is, I forget, when I'm in the 'Type' tool, and I type a W and I won't notice, and somebody will be proof checking my work, and they'll be like, "What's a Homwe?" And I'll pretend like I don't know, somebody else did it. I know it, it's because I tapped the W key, and I was on the 'Type' tool, bad idea.

The other thing we're going to check is the 'Display'. So, mine is set by default to high quality display. I think that's a fact of the new bits of software. The new installs in InDesign, if you're using an older one--we're going to look at that. So, I've got nothing selected, go up to 'View', there's one called 'Display Performance'. So often, especially the earlier versions I'm not sure if it's the new version or not. I'm not sure if it's settings that I've got, or whether it's remembered from my last install, or whether it's actually by default now, but let's just double check.

'Typical Display' is what it used to be set as, and yours might be. The problem is that things just look a little bit gross. You can see, the logo here, just doesn't look very nice. You know it's good quality because you've seen it in a different program but it's not looking good in here. The reason it's often the default for 'Typical' quality is because it tries to run fast. InDesign's trying to run quickly so it's not producing these beautiful outlined logos and it's the same with images. So, it's 'Typical' by default. So, what we can do, nothing selected, 'View', and crank yours up to 'High Quality'. I work in 'High Quality' all the time, even with an A page document. Why? Because my machine can handle it. I've got a pretty new MacBook Pro. If you're working on a really old crappy laptop, hand me, hand me downs, you might find, actually it just can't keep up. So, you might manually go in and say "Actually I'm going to look at everything 'Typical' quality, because maybe you're doing type amends, and it just takes so long to scroll through all the pages so you can switch to 'Typical' quality.

If you're running Windows XP on a really old laptop that barely starts up, what you might do is, you might go to 'View', and there's another one on there that says 'Fast Display'. What this will do is allow you to do text amends super-duper fast. These aren't gone. If you produce a PDF now, or print it, they'll print fine, they're just place holders to make this system run really fast. If you are finding, "Man, this is jumpy, and slow," switch to 'Fast', and you can toggle between if you're working with the images.

One last thing about previewing, let's say you're going to present to somebody, say a colleague, or my boss, or clients, I'm going to show them my design instead of showing them this ugly version with the blue lines and all my swatches around here, what I want to do is present it to them. So I could make a PDF, and make a presentation, that sort of stuff, but it's actually easy to do straight from InDesign. Down the bottom here of your toolbar, right down the bottom, this last one, if I click and hold 'Normal', 'Preview' is the one we've been toggling between when we hit W. This is the long way, if I click on 'Preview' that is the exact same as hitting W. We don't want that one.

This one here, we never use. 'Bleed' and 'Slug' will show you a preview, but include the 'Bleed' and 'Slug'. I never use these, I use this one down the bottom here, 'Presentation'. Does this, it's quite cool. Gets rid of all the junk, and just presents it nicely, kind of like a PowerPoint presentation. And if you've got multiple pages, you can use your keyboard. I only have one page, but you can use the arrow key on your keyboard and work through all your different pages, like PowerPoint. And you can actually add transitions between them all. We'll do that in the more advanced InDesign course.

How do I get out of that? In it, hit 'Escape' to get back, and we are back to the ugly blue line version. All right, that's it for this one. Let's go and make a PDF version in the next video. I'll see you there.