Troubleshooting - List of potential issues

Extract from Tips for Designing Templates documentation by Print UI.

While you are uploading templates, you will sometimes get an error message during the preflight. Many times the error message will be self explanatory. However, some of the error messages, such as “uncaught Javascript exception,” will be less than helpful. Or the template may upload, but then produce strange results in the web editor or in the final PDF.

Some common problems to watch for:

Font issues such as…

• Mixing TrueType and OpenType fonts for the same font family. InDesign gets confused when you do this. All fonts in a single font family (“Arial” is an example of a font family) should all be either OTF or TTF.
  
  
• Using the Arial Black font in your template. InDesign gets confused.
  
  
• Using bad fonts, such as really old Postscript fonts that have been converted into OTF or TTF format. Many times the font information embedded in the font is incorrect.
  
  
• The best solution to font problems is to obtain a complete family of fonts all at one time and in OpenType format. Using the PrintUI panel in InDesign, be sure to delete all of the old versions of the fonts before uploading the new ones.
  
  
• Using bullets from fonts that have non-standard glyph encoding. Many Wingdings and Dingbats style fonts have this problem. Instead, you should select a bullet character from a font that does use standard encodings. For example, Adobe’s Minion Pro font has a small bullet glyph at Unicode 2022 and a large square bullet glyph at Unicode 23F9. Use a font utility to view which glyphs are available in your particular font.
  
  
• When packaging the Template, the InDesign font engine and Flash font engines can handle text sizes in boxes differently depending on the font, causing the font to appear hidden. In this case, enlarge the size of the text frame.

Using a feature that PrintUI’s web editor doesn’t support such as…

• Using spreads or facing pages in your template.
  
  
• Using stroked text where the text is drawn using vector paths.
  
  
• Text on a path.
  
  
• Using gradient transparency.
  
  
• Embedded images that were copied and pasted into the document. Only linked images are supported.
  
  
• Multiple references to the same linked image.
• Tables overlapping across multiple pages.

Other things such as…

• Accidentally opening the document from PrintUI’s packaging folder rather than the actual document in the original folder.
  
  
• Links to files on networked drives. All linked files should be in a local folder.
  
  
• Images that are embedded (i.e. via copy and paste) rather than linked.
  
  
• Objects that are very tiny or have zero width.
  
  
• The ZIP created as a result of PrintUI’s packaging is larger than the 800 MB upload limit due to using extremely large images.
  
  
• Duplicate frame names.
  
  
• Templates above 130 inches in size. They may not render correctly to the user in the online editor. The customizes export file however will render as expected.
  
  
• Large multi-layered PSD images in the editor. These will sometime throw an error when placed as an image. It is advised to keep PSD layers under 15/20MB to avoid this issue.

Or sometimes the InDesign document simply becomes corrupted.

This is a known issue with InDesign and can be made worse by opening a document that was created in an older version of InDesign. These are the steps that we recommend to clean out any corruption:

• First try exiting from InDesign and launching it again. Surprisingly enough, this sometimes is all that is required.
  
  
• Use the InDesign package feature to copy the document and all assets to a single location.
  
  
• Try to save the document as IDML and open and package that.
  
  
• Copy all pages to a new document. Start with a new document that has the same page size and then add your content. You should be able to just drag your pages into the new document.

• If none of these work, divide and conquer. Delete half the document and try to package. Then delete half of what does not work, and again in half until you find the problematic piece. Or you can try using different fonts.

Also check out a list of Unsupported InDesign Features here. Complex shapes cannot be uploaded within the Editable layers selection, and should be moved to the Background layer group.