What is the Meaning of DT in the Links Panel?

Monica Murphy

6

Before I hand over any InDesign document to a client as “final” I have a list of items that I always check. I make sure the pasteboards are clean, that no empty text or image frames are floating around, and that my style lists don’t include any styles imported from other programs like Word. Of course, this final check also includes checking the Preflight Status and the Links Panel.

While checking the Links panel for a document I was working on last year, I noticed that there were a few images that had “PB,” “OV,” and “DT” next to them in the Page column. Easy fixes, right?

I had images on the pasteboard (PB), which I fixed by deleting them or moving them back onto the page. I also had anchored images in overset text (OV), which also showed up in the Preflight Status as errors. I took care of those by fixing the overset text.

At that point, the Preflight Status listed no errors that would prevent the file from printing or exporting correctly. But wait! The Links panel indicated that my document still wasn’t quite ready for me to hand off, as I had a good number of images with “DT” after them.

This was a long document with many images, and I had no idea how to find and fix the problem, because I didn’t even know what DT stood for.

I tried to select the links and select the Go to Link option from the panel menu, but that resulted in the following error message.

Then I remembered that our copyeditor used the Story Editor to edit the text and she had Track Changes turned on. This is how I could see the deleted text and the deleted links.

So, I opened the Story Editor (Edit > Edit in Story Editor or press Command/Ctrl+Y) and found the links in question were anchored in text that had been deleted. In order for the DTs in the Links panel to be resolved, I had to open the Track Changes panel, or right-click on the deleted image anchor in the text and accept the change for each image that was deleted in the Story Editor—or even better, I could Accept All Changes in the Track Changes panel.

I know these deleted images were not generating an error that would cause a problem in the output of this file, but it’s always nice to resolve any issues and hand off a nice, clean file.