Whether you're a professional graphic designer or a business owner who uses Adobe InDesign to produce in-house documents, you may use InDesign objects to add notes or experiment with alternative approaches to a design problem. When you're ready to print your document, you can suppress the output of your private editing notes or layout experiments without deleting them. Likewise, you can print a quick proofreader's copy of your layout when all you want to examine is its text.

Individual Objects

1. Open the Window menu, locate its Output submenu and choose "Attributes" to reveal the Attributes panel if it isn't already visible. The panel's short height makes it easy to hide behind other taller panels, so if you see a check mark in front of its menu item but don't see the panel on your screen, hide it and bring it up again to locate it.

2. Activate the Selection tool in the Adobe InDesign toolbox. Click on an item you want to designate as a non-printing object. Shift-click to select other items, or draw a marquee around several objects to select more than one at a time.

3. Turn on the "Nonprinting" option in the Attributes panel. This suppresses the item's output when you print.

Layers

1. Open the Window menu and choose "Layers" to reveal the Layers panel. Double-click on the listing for the layer whose objects you want to suppress at print time. You also can open the fly-out menu at the top-right corner of the panel and choose "Layer Options for [Layer name]," where "Layer name" represents the name of your layer.

2. Uncheck "Print Layer" in the Layer Options dialog box. Once you deselect this option, nothing on the layer prints.

3. Open the File menu and choose "Print" to bring up the Print dialog box. Enter the page range and number of copies you want to print. Click on the "Print" button to send your output to a printing device. If you're directing your output to a PDF file, you'll see a "Save" button instead of a "Print" button.

Graphics

1. Open the File menu and choose "Print" to bring up the Print dialog box. Click on the "Graphics" category in the list of print settings at the left side of the dialog box.

2. Click on the "Send Data" drop-down menu and choose "None." This setting temporarily treats all your images as nonprinting.

3. Select the "General" category in the list of print settings. Enter your desired page range and number of copies, then click on the "Print" button to generate your printout.

4. Examine your output. You'll see frames with crossbar symbols instead of your images, but the frames accurately represent the size of your graphics and preserve their clipping paths, so their effect on your text appears.