Open the PDF and choose Tools > Print Production > Preflight in the right pane.
- Acrobat User Guide
- Introduction to Acrobat
- Workspace
- Workspace basics
- Opening and viewing PDFs
- Working with online storage accounts
- Acrobat and macOS
- Acrobat notifications
- Grids, guides, and measurements in PDFs
- Asian, Cyrillic, and right-to-left text in PDFs
- Workspace basics
- Creating PDFs
- Editing PDFs
- Edit text in PDFs
- Edit images or objects in a PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Edit scanned PDFs
- Enhance document photos captured using a mobile camera
- Optimizing PDFs
- PDF properties and metadata
- Links and attachments in PDFs
- PDF layers
- Page thumbnails and bookmarks in PDFs
- PDFs converted to web pages
- Setting up PDFs for a presentation
- PDF articles
- Geospatial PDFs
- Applying actions and scripts to PDFs
- Change the default font for adding text
- Delete pages from a PDF
- Scan and OCR
- Forms
- PDF forms basics
- Create a form from scratch in Acrobat
- Create and distribute PDF forms
- Fill in PDF forms
- PDF form field properties
- Fill and sign PDF forms
- Setting action buttons in PDF forms
- Publishing interactive PDF web forms
- PDF form field basics
- PDF barcode form fields
- Collect and manage PDF form data
- About forms tracker
- PDF forms help
- Send PDF forms to recipients using email or an internal server
- Combining files
- Combine or merge files into single PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Add headers, footers, and Bates numbering to PDFs
- Crop PDF pages
- Add watermarks to PDFs
- Add backgrounds to PDFs
- Working with component files in a PDF Portfolio
- Publish and share PDF Portfolios
- Overview of PDF Portfolios
- Create and customize PDF Portfolios
- Sharing, reviews, and commenting
- Share and track PDFs online
- Mark up text with edits
- Preparing for a PDF review
- Starting a PDF review
- Hosting shared reviews on SharePoint or Office 365 sites
- Participating in a PDF review
- Add comments to PDFs
- Adding a stamp to a PDF
- Approval workflows
- Managing comments | view, reply, print
- Importing and exporting comments
- Tracking and managing PDF reviews
- Saving and exporting PDFs
- Security
- Enhanced security setting for PDFs
- Securing PDFs with passwords
- Manage Digital IDs
- Securing PDFs with certificates
- Opening secured PDFs
- Removing sensitive content from PDFs
- Setting up security policies for PDFs
- Choosing a security method for PDFs
- Security warnings when a PDF opens
- Securing PDFs with Adobe Experience Manager
- Protected View feature for PDFs
- Overview of security in Acrobat and PDFs
- JavaScripts in PDFs as a security risk
- Attachments as security risks
- Allow or block links in PDFs
- Electronic signatures
- Sign PDF documents
- Capture your signature on mobile and use it everywhere
- Send documents for e-signatures
- Create a web form
- Request e-signatures in bulk
- Collect online payments
- Brand your account
- About certificate signatures
- Certificate-based signatures
- Validating digital signatures
- Adobe Approved Trust List
- Manage trusted identities
- Printing
- Accessibility, tags, and reflow
- Searching and indexing
- Multimedia and 3D models
- Add audio, video, and interactive objects to PDFs
- Adding 3D models to PDFs (Acrobat Pro)
- Displaying 3D models in PDFs
- Interacting with 3D models
- Measuring 3D objects in PDFs
- Setting 3D views in PDFs
- Enable 3D content in PDF
- Adding multimedia to PDFs
- Commenting on 3D designs in PDFs
- Playing video, audio, and multimedia formats in PDFs
- Add comments to videos
- Print production tools (Acrobat Pro)
- Preflight (Acrobat Pro)
- PDF/X-, PDF/A-, and PDF/E-compliant files
- Preflight profiles
- Advanced preflight inspections
- Preflight reports
- Viewing preflight results, objects, and resources
- Output intents in PDFs
- Correcting problem areas with the Preflight tool
- Automating document analysis with droplets or preflight actions
- Analyzing documents with the Preflight tool
- Additional checks in the Preflight tool
- Preflight libraries
- Preflight variables
- Color management
To verify that your Adobe® PDF contains only the features, fonts, and formatting that you’ve specified, use the Preflight tool to inspect and, in certain cases, correct the document’s contents.
About preflight inspections
The Preflight tool analyzes the contents of a PDF to determine its validity for print production and a variety of other conditions that you can specify. Preflight inspects the file against a set of user-defined values, called preflight profiles. Depending on the profile, the preflight inspection can also correct certain errors. Preflight also runs checks and fixups on visible areas or certain objects and makes PDFs comply with various standards.
Preflight identifies issues with colors, fonts, transparency, image resolution, ink coverage, PDF version compatibility and more. Preflight also includes tools for examining PDF syntax or the actual PDF structure of a document.
Before you use the Preflight tool or create a PDF for print, follow these recommendations:
If you created PDFs using Acrobat Distiller, InDesign or Illustrator, optimize them for print or press. Use either the pre-defined settings in Distiller or InDesign PDF styles or settings provided by your print service provider.
Embed all fonts from within the authoring application. Embedding ensures that fonts aren’t substituted.
The Preflight dialog box
Use the Preflight dialog box to control all aspects of the preflight inspection. If the Print Production panel is not visible in the right pane, choose Tools > Print Production. Then choose Preflight in the right pane.
A. Libraries B. Views C. Display Settings Alert (off by default) D. Preflight profiles, checks or fixes E. Groups F. Profile description G. Search All Libraries
Run a preflight inspection
You can use or modify an existing profile, or create your own.
-
-
Select any library from the Libraries drop-down list.
-
Do one of the following:
To view a list of available profiles, click the Select Profiles button .
To view a list of available checks, click the Select Single Checks button .
To view a list of available fixups, click the Select Single Fixups button .
-
Use the menu to specify if you want to view all, your favorites, most recently used, most frequently used, or one of the available categories.
-
Select a profile, check or fixup on the list to see its description.
Profiles are organized in groups that you can expand and collapse. Profiles with the gray wrench icon include fixups that can correct errors in your file.
Märkus.You can also use the Find box to search for a profile, check, or fixup.
-
(Optional) Select a profile or single check, expand Further Options and do any of the following, as needed:
Specify whether to limit the inspection to visible layers. Selecting this option disables any fixups.
Specify a page range for the inspection.
-
If you selected a profile, click Analyze to run the inspection without fixing the errors or Analyze And Fix to identify and fix the problems. If you selected a single check only, the Analyze option is available. If you selected a single fixup, click Fix to start a fixup.
Märkus.You can also double-click a profile in the list to run the preflight inspection. If you double-click the file, profiles that contain fixups apply the fixups.
Preflight preferences
Use the Preflight Preferences dialog box to control how results are reported and to specify output intents when creating PDF/X, PDF/A, or PDF/E files. A PDF can have an embedded output intent containing an ICC profile.
To open the Preflight Preferences dialog box, from the Preflight dialog box, choose Options > Preferences.
General tab
The General tab includes options for specifying how dialog box elements and preflight results are displayed:
Maximum Number Of Results To Be Displayed Per Type Of Check
Specifies how many instances of a mismatch appear in the Results list. Use the Per Page (Under “Further Matches”) option to nest additional results under the Further Matches section in the Results list. The maximum number of results for a document is 25000.
Degree Of Detail When Displaying Results
Specifies how much detail appears in the Preflight Results list. You can specify no details, only important details, or all details.
Show “Display Settings Alert” If Display Is Not Set To Highest Quality
Displays a Warning icon at the top of the Preflight dialog box if the display is not set to the highest quality. You can click the Warning icon to see a list of the alerts. Click Adjust to automatically adjust the settings for maximized reliability of the display of the selected PDF document.
Output intent options
You can set the following options on the Output Intents tab of the Preflight Preferences dialog box. For more information on using output intents, see Output intents.
Name
The name of the output intent.
Output Intent Profile (ICC Profile)
The ICC profile that describes the characterized printing condition for which the document has been prepared and that is required for PDF/X-, PDF/A-, or PDF/E-compliance. Click Browse to select one from the default Profiles folder.
Output Condition Identifier
The reference name specified by the ICC registry of registered standard printing conditions. Choose from the list of output conditions—the description appears in the Output Condition box—or choose Custom and create your own.
Registry
The URL giving more information about the output intent profile name. For the standard printing conditions registered with the ICC, this entry must be http://www.color.org/.
Output Condition
A description of the intended printing condition of the job, including type of printing (for example, offset commercial), paper type, and screen frequency. You can modify this description for output conditions you edit or create from scratch.
ICC Profile URL For PDF/X-4p
The URL that provides output intent information for PDF/X-4p file types.
Locked
This option is a safeguard against accidental modification of the output intent. All the text fields are dimmed.
Highlighting tab
The Highlighting tab includes options for identifying problem objects on a PDF page. The Highlighting preferences control the appearance of masks in mask reports. They also control the appearance of lines on screen when you double-click Highlighting in the Preflight Results window. You set highlighting properties for each type of alert: Error, Warning, and Info.
Problems Highlighted By Transparent Masks
Identifies the problems by highlighting them. If this option is deselected, non-problematic content is highlighted and problem content is not highlighted.
Color/Opacity
Click Color to choose colors from a color spectrum. Specify the opacity of the color.
Draw Border For Bounding Box
Draws the same lines in a mask report that you see on screen when you double-click a result in the Preflight Results window. This option is useful for identifying objects in a mask report when an image occupies the entire page. In this case you don’t see the mask, but you see the lines around objects.
Color/Line Style/Effective Line Width
Click Color to choose colors from a color spectrum. ClickLine Style to select the line pattern (lines, dots, or dashes). Specify the line width (thickness).