blank page (which has text on) not printing

[travelbugsphotography]

CS5 on a mac,

I have down loaded a L7161 template from Avery and draged it to iD which then opens it in indesign CS5, i have typed text in the boxes and gone to print, where i receive a message telling me “ the pages selected to print are all blank….and so on.i have been on the adobe page and found info in the community telling me to untick the non printing box in attributes and also one in layers. so it then printed a doc, i made some small changes to the doc and again had the same problem, but this time if i un tick the attributes box it will not clear only go to a dash instead. again i have tried and found if i click on the document after the dash will disappear. but it still won't print. sometimes it gets past the message and the printer starts to move and make some ready to work noise....but then it just sends the page though, with no ink on the page! maybe i should just do it with a pen, skiping the mac and the printer.

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

Are you familiar enough with the general workings of InDesign?

I cannot download the Avery template so this is pure conjecture. However, I think your problem may be that the template contains indicators (placeholders) as non-printing items or on non-printing layer (or even both), and you are not supposed to change these. If you do, these items will show up on your pages!

Open the original template again and carefully inspect the Layers palette. Is there more than one layer? If Avery thought this through, they saved it with at least an additional "normal" layer for you to work on.

If there is only one, is it marked "non-printing"? If so, add a new layer (and make sure it's not set to "non-printing", obviously) and draw your text on that.

Also, check if you are not accidentally working on a master page. Stuff that you put on a master page will not appear in the 'regular' document, unless you apply that master page to a 'regular' page. (And it's not the recommended workflow either.) All your own text should appear on your own pages.

Furthermore, no need to send it to your printer to see what happens! Export to PDF and look what appears on your screen! There is a checkbox in the Export dialog to automatically open the PDF when it's finished exporting. Don't forget to close the PDF, though, else you cannot overwrite it for a new attempt.

Do not be tempted to check the box to force printing of "Non-printing objects"! This will bite you back at some point; either you get everything you asked for, plus all guides and whatnot which you did not ask for, or you decide to switch it off and discover that you placed some of the stuff you want to be printed on non-printing layers.

Finally: use the various preview screen modes in InDesign to your advantage. Do your design with all guides and marges etc. visible, toggle to Preview mode to see how it looks without them. InDesign is smart enough to automatically hide non-printing object when in preview mode, and it should look just like when finally printing.

[travelbugsphotography]

wow, wow, wow, thank you so much, having spent all day yesterday making no real progess i am now saved. I can now print out 70 labels for my homemade jam and put it al on the shelf. And us this again for so many other projects.

And thanks for the super quick reply, have only just now had time to get it done.

it is just as you said, two layers one with the tempate and one which now as my text on and prints aplenty.

All the best

Alan

From deepest darkest shropshire (uk)

[ranal59629657]

This was happening to me in Illustrator.  I added a new layer for text and it printed.