Discover how to export and save your InDesign projects in different formats and methods, ensuring flexibility and compatibility for various needs and users. Learn the process of packaging a project in InDesign, which includes all necessary images, fonts, and other assets, for easy sharing and future editing.
Key Insights
- The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to export an InDesign project in different file formats including .indd, templates, older InDesign files, and multiple image formats.
- It is emphasized that merely saving an InDesign file does not include the images, fonts, and other assets, and to share an entire project, one should package it. Packaging InDesign projects will bundle all elements required for the project together, making it easier for sharing or future editing.
- The article also touches on legal considerations when exporting and packaging fonts, pointing out that appropriate font licensing needs to be adhered to when sharing these fonts.
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In this video, we'll be exporting our newsletter. In the past, we've been saving files by going to File, Save, or File, Save As, and by saving our file as a.indd file, or the latest InDesign file, we're able to save our work.
In addition, through Save As, we can also click the dropdown and save our file as a template that we might be able to reuse, say, in a newsletter that goes out monthly, or we can also save it as an older InDesign file. This is important to do because if you're sharing this file, an older version of InDesign can utilize this file type rather than the newest file type, which may have updated features. Let's now click Cancel, and we'll go through another option to get our newsletter out.
Through this option, we'll go to File, Export. From here, many of the export options have a little more limitation with how you can edit them in the future. If we click the dropdown here, we'll see that we have multiple ways to save this file, including an Adobe PDF print, and we can export our image here as a JPEG or a PNG as well.
In this case, let's select JPEG, and we'll click Save, and to export as a JPEG, we can select our range such as All Pages, and we can either export the Pages or the Spreads. In this case, let's select Spreads. We can also designate a Quality.
We'll select Medium, a Format Method, and a Resolution for the number of pixels per inch. The higher the number here, the more pixels we'll get and the higher definition. And let's click Export.
If we now open up our folder, we'll see that we actually have JPEGs exported. Here's the Spread for Page 2 and 3. And all throughout here, we have all of the JPEGs for our actual newsletter. While the JPEGs can be helpful depending on your project, it's not always helpful for another editor to be able to work with or for you to save and edit later.
So in this case, we actually want to package the project. In order to do this, we'll go to File, and we'll go to Package. Simply saving our InDesign files allows the file to know where the images are supposed to go and what fonts are supposed to be used and how they're organized within the actual project.
However, saving the file itself does not actually save the images, fonts, and other assets. Therefore, to share an entire project with someone else or maybe save it for your files for later, you'll want to package the project to include all of the different elements you'll need for the project. In this case, we'll use Package.
And from here, we can see that we have five fonts. We have 12 different images and colors. And so we're going to want to package all of these together by clicking Package.
From here, we'll get a couple different options, and we'll leave Copy Fonts, Linked Graphics, Update Graphic Links and Package, and we'll include the IDML or the older version of InDesign, as well as include a PDF for print. We'll select High Quality Print, and from here, we're now going to click Package, and we're going to get a warning sign here. This warning sign essentially warns you that as the user of these fonts, you need to personally adhere to the licensing of the fonts.
It's important to read through this and recognize that if you're packaging fonts within the file, the individual who's using them on the other side also has to have appropriate licensing. Therefore, remember that as you're exporting and packaging fonts, it's important to recognize that sharing these fonts isn't always legal. We'll click OK, and in this case, it'll now go through the process of packaging all of the different images, fonts, and various assets for our entire package.
Once it's complete, we can open up our folder, and we'll see that we have an entire Domus Newsletter folder. If we double click in here, we can see that we have our indd file or InDesign file that we typically use, our IDML file, and this contains the older version of InDesign file. Within links, we can see that we have all of our images.
However, keep in mind that the other images that we chose not to use such as our other kitchen or other living space images, are not in here because they were not actually in our InDesign file. We'll go back out now, and if we open up Document Fonts, we'll see that the fonts that we've used are also in here. Next, let's look at our PDF.
Within our PDF here, we have all of the pages that we've exported and created. Take a look through and make sure that everything looks appropriate, and for your final project, we'll be uploading this PDF file to the platform as your final grade. Please upload only this PDF file as it's not necessary to upload either the InDesign files or the entire package.
Once you've gone through and proofed your entire newsletter and exported it as a PDF, please upload the PDF to the portal. With that, I hope you've enjoyed this InDesign course and look forward to the future of continuing to explore InDesign.