Multilingual DTP QC · IDML in, IDML out
Upload your translated IDMLs. Get back a per-page report of overset text, missing glyphs, wrong text direction, and corrupted tags — across every language version at once.
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Email only. No newsletter and no sales sequence — we send your upload link and nothing else.
How it works
Drop in your translated IDMLs — every language at once. No InDesign licence, nothing to install, the IDML is parsed directly. Whatever came out of Trados, Phrase or memoQ goes straight in.
A per-issue list with the page and the frame identified. "Frame A3 oversets by 4 lines." "Paragraph direction is LTR on a Hebrew target." "Brand-Sans has no glyph for ש." Each issue carries a proposed fix, held inside the bounds you set.
Repaired IDMLs, plus a QC report you can hand to the client: what was found, what changed, and what was deliberately left alone. Your INDD originals were never part of it.
de.idml, he.idml and ja.idml go in together and get compared against each other, so a frame that only breaks in German is obvious rather than buried. That cross-language pass is the part InDesign's Preflight has no concept of.
Maximum tracking adjustment, maximum leading change, whether a frame may resize at all. Nothing outside those bounds gets touched, and everything inside them is listed.
Per page, per frame, per issue: what was found, what changed, what was left alone. It's the artefact to send when a client asks whether the Arabic version has been checked.
Why now
Four dated, sourced facts. This section is deliberately short, because we are not going to pad it with anything we can't point at.
Specialist vendors price DTP-only work at US$1–3 per page. Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and Urdu carry roughly a 30% premium; CJK about 25%. A 100-page document into five languages is 500 pages of DTP work — per revision cycle.
Overset text, RTL architecture and accessibility tagging cannot be caught or fixed by translators, reviewers, or TMS automation. They require a specialist at the end of the pipeline. That is the structural reason this cost never quite goes away.
Enterprise adoption of AI translation is near-universal, and the gap between TMS output and a finished multilingual document is not closing. Faster translation pipelines produce layout problems faster.
InDesign's 2026 Flex Layout does not handle text expansion, RTL document logic, or mixed-script typography. The gap at the end of the localization pipeline is still open.
Where this sits
Preflight is in-app and single-file. The TMS owns the text and treats layout as out of scope. That boundary is exactly where the cost leaks.
| InDesign Preflight | Your TMS | DTP hours | IDML Check | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Knows what the target language is | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reads every language version in one pass | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Flags overset text | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Flags wrong RTL paragraph direction | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Flags missing glyphs | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Repairs, not just reports | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Needs an InDesign licence | yes | no | theirs | no |
| Priced per | included | word | page | page |
The DTP column is not a competitor. A specialist is still the person who decides whether a headline can afford to lose a line — this removes the first four hours of their day, the mechanical pass, not the judgment.
Pricing
Upload as much as you like and read every report for nothing. You pay per page only when IDML Check writes a repaired file.
$0unlimited
Upload, get the full issue report, keep it. No repairs.
Start a check
Email only. No newsletter and no sales sequence — we send your upload link and nothing else.
$0.10/ page
Proposed fixes, applied within your bounds, exported back as IDML.
Start a check
Email only. No newsletter and no sales sequence — we send your upload link and nothing else.
Priced per page because that is the unit you already quote in, and set roughly an order of magnitude under the $1–3 per page that specialist DTP-only work is priced at. Repairs are charged on pages written, not pages uploaded — a page the linter clears costs nothing.
Send in the IDMLs that came back from translation and read the report. The linter is free and unlimited; you only pay when you export a repaired file.
Start a check
Email only. No newsletter and no sales sequence — we send your upload link and nothing else.
No. The IDML is parsed directly, so nothing has to open in InDesign and there is nothing to install. That is also why it runs across twelve language versions at once instead of one document at a time.
No. IDML in, IDML out. Your originals are never uploaded, never read and never modified.
Files are processed and then deleted within 24 hours of the run, and nothing you upload is used to train anything. The QC report stays available to you until you delete it, and it can be exported and the record removed at any point. We know this one is not negotiable: an LSP under client NDAs cannot upload a pharmaceutical catalogue to a service with a vague privacy paragraph, so the window is a stated number rather than a promise to be reasonable.
Yes. It takes whatever IDML comes out of the far end of your pipeline. It is tool-agnostic by design — it reads the file format, not your TMS.
You set the bounds — maximum tracking adjustment, maximum leading change, whether a frame is allowed to resize at all. Nothing exceeds them, and every single change is listed in the report, so a repaired file can be diffed against what you sent.
It is a first-class case, not an afterthought. Paragraph direction being LTR on a Hebrew or Arabic target is one of the checks that runs by default, precisely because it is the failure that is invisible to everyone upstream and obvious to the client. The Hebrew version of this page is right-to-left for the same reason.
Supported, with an honest caveat: line-breaking rules differ, so overset detection for Japanese, Chinese and Korean runs more conservatively than for Latin script. It flags borderline frames rather than quietly passing them, which means a few more items to look at on a CJK job.