An inventory report shows resources used in a PDF, including color spaces, images, patterns, shadings, metadata, and fonts and glyphs in each font family. Related information is grouped together and arranged on a PDF page so that you can scan and locate items. You can run an inventory report before or after you run a preflight inspection. Unlike a preflight results report, which provides only the information requested by checks in the selected profile, an inventory report does not filter the PDF content. Together, a preflight inspection report and an inventory report can help you identify and fix problems.
The information in an inventory report can be useful when you perform tasks such as these:
Exploring files that seem unusual, such as those created by an unknown application, or files with slow screen redraw, or copy-and-paste actions that don’t work.
Examining processing issues, such as failure to print correctly, or problems encountered during color conversion, imposition, placement on an InDesign page, and so on.
Identifying aspects of a PDF that are not ideal, such as the inadvertent embedding of a font because of an unnoticed space character on a master page, or cropped images with extraneous image data, or objects that are not of the expected type (such as type or vector objects converted to images or merged with an image).
Providing additional information about an object besides its presence. For example, by locating a spot color in the inventory report, you can determine whether it is used by itself or in combination with other colorants, such as in a duotone image. Or you can determine which glyphs in a font are embedded, what they look like, and which character they are supposed to represent. This information can help you resolve a missing glyph error.
Exploring XMP metadata embedded with the file, such as its author, resolution, color space, copyright, and keywords applied to it. This information is stored in a standardized way using the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) standard.