Find Common InDesign Errors with Quality Assurance Plug-in

David Blatner

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I think the Preflight feature in InDesign is really great, except for two things: It won’t work in CS3, and it can’t find a lot of the “errors” that I’m looking for! That’s why I asked the folks at dtptools.com to make a new plug-in that would solve both of these for users.

They came up with a plug-in called Quality Assurance, and we added it in as one of the 12 plug-ins in the Blatner Tools suite. Here’s some of the stuff it can find:

• Multiple punctuation or spaces (two dashes in a row, two spaces after a period, three exclamation points, etc.)
• Leading or trailing spaces (spaces at the beginning of a paragraph, extra returns between paragraphs, etc.)
• Frames that are overset, empty, hiding on the pasteboard, or even hiding behind other frames
• Frames that are duplicated (for example, if you accidentally placed two images in the same position, one partly on top of the other)
• Runts (short lines at the end of a paragraph; you can say how many characters you will allow)
• Too-thin strokes, unnamed colors for fill or stroke, and more!

If you’re the kind of person who likes to see things in action, here’s a movie I just made about how the QA panel works:

Even better, the Quality Assurance panel is only one of 12 different plug-ins in the suite! And the suite is 30% off  (only $99 or 79 EUR) until the end of November!

You can get more information about QA and BlatnerTools at blatnertools.com.