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Code Line

Software for Creative Professionals

Better Adobe InDesign Previews with SneakPeek Pro

We've gotten some emails asking about better previews from InDesign when using SneakPeek for iOS and SneakPeek Pro for Mac. It turns out there is a simple way to get better previews, and here's how…

Go to InDesign's Preferences
(InDesign > Preferences > File Handling… ⌘K)

Indesignpreferencescs5

Note: In addition to setting the preview size, you can also set the number of pages that are previewed in Adobe InDesign CS5 (or later). Keep in mind the number of previews also affect file size.

You can select between Small, Medium (Default), Large and Extra Large. We found that going from a Medium preview for our single-page, 8-1/2" x 11" sample to Large only added about 59KB and from Large to Extra Large another 427KB. Your results may vary, but you may want to start off by storing the Large preview depending on your needs.

Here are a few samples to show what we found:

  1. 1,024 Pixel Preview - Extra Large
  2.    512 Pixel Preview - Large
  3.    256 Pixel Preview - Medium (Default setting in InDesign)
(download)
On a standard US Letter document, Medium previews began to Greek text below 24 point. On both the Large and Extra Large previews, text was still legible at 12 point. Further testing showed the Large preview would Greek text at 10 point and the Extra Large preview didn't start 'til 4 point text. That said, the Large preview should suffice for most.

That's all there is to it. This, of course, won't affect your previously saved documents. But moving forward, this should give you a better experience working with InDesign.

If you'd like to download the demo files we used for this test, you can download a .zip file here. But make sure you have a copy of SneakPeek Pro installed, so you can preview the items in Quick Look.

Oh… Just one more thing. In case you've forgotten what Quick Look looks like without SneakPeek Pro, here it is:

Quicklookwithoutsneakpeekpro2
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