What’s That Alert or Question Mark Icon in InDesign?
Christopher wrote:
I occasionally see question marks or yellow warning triangles with an exclamation point in them. I can’t figure out what they are trying to tell me.
InDesign has various alert icons scattered throughout the program, so I’m not sure exactly which you’re talking about. I’ll cover all the ones I can think of.
Links Panel
The main place you’ll see both yellow triangles and red question marks is the Links panel. Red means “missing” (InDesign can’t find this file on disk) and yellow means “modified” (the file changed since you imported it). You can use the Relink and the Update buttons to fix these solutions.
Colors and Swatches
The yellow triangle with an exclamation point that sometimes appears in the Color panel or the New Swatches (or Swatch Options) dialog box means the color you picked cannot be reproduced in the current CMYK color space. If you click on the little swatch next to the icon, InDesign will snap the current color to the nearest CMYK-valid equivalent.
Hyperlinks and Cross-References
The Hyperlinks panel can also show some alerts, including the “Hey, something is wrong with this hyperlink” icon (red flag), the “Hey, someone deleted the text that this cross reference is pointing to” icon (red flag), and the “Watch out, the text or page number of this cross reference needs updating” icon (yellow triangle). The latter two are CS4 only, of course (cross-references are new in CS4).
I can’t think of any other flags or alert icons in InDesign, though I’m sure some eagle-eyed reader will surprise us with another one or two. Any takers?
When you Preflight Book documents, Red and Green circle
Assignment Panel
The yellow triangle also shows up all too frequently in the book panel.
Yes phil, especially when you have the book panel docked and it’s minimised, you have a file open from the book and you save and close, you expand the book panel from the dock and the file has a yellow triangle beside it because “it was saved when the panel wasn’t open”. (that’s not an accurate quote
)
The structure pane shows yellow triangles (with a bonus red stroke to make them extra scary) when your XML fails to validate.
The red stroke that indicates overset text in Story Editor
I think with most of the warning symbols that if you hover the mouse over it for a few seconds it pops up with a tip on what the warning is about.
“Sometimes InDesign’s alert icons are mysterious to the unintiated. Here’s an explanation of a few of them.”
Perhaps it should read, “Uninitiated.”
@Matt: Nah, it should read “unintimidated”.
I have one I still can’t figure out how to fix. It’s in the book panel. First, make a book with a bunch of cross references and bookmarks. Now, move the folder of files to another place on your hard drive. Now preflight the book. A bunch of mysterious black circle question marks icons show up in the book panel. And I can’t figure out how to fix them (short of moving the folder back to its original location). Any ideas?
I too am getting the black question marks when preflighting a book and I haven’t moved the folder anywhere. I have no idea why it’s telling me there’s no preflight information.
Has this ever been answered? I have a book with the white question mark over black circle. Is there a source explaining everyone of InDesign’s alerts, warnings, etc.?
According to the Adobe help file:
A green, red, or question mark icon indicates the preflight status of each document. Green indicates the document has no reported errors. Red indicates errors. A question mark indicates an unknown status. For example, the document may be closed, preflighting may be turned off, or the preflight profile was changed.
What’s totally confusing about this is that the black circle is never mentioned in the Help file. My guess is that they just needed a way to make the white question mark show up against the light gray background and simply forgot to mention the part about there being a black circle behind the question mark.
A clearer way of writing it would have been: A white question mark on a black circle indicates an unknown status.
Ah HA! Thanks, Kelly!