hi need help..how do we import illustrator files to indesign.

[samsaliva]

hi guys.,i am new here. i hope u guys can help me.

ok here is the problem

i cant seems to import an illstrator file in to in design.
can anyone help me please. i need it urgently.
thank you guys... :)

[AdobeAce]

Hi samsaliva,

Save your Illustrator file as AI. This Native format is most compatible with InDesign.

Then go back to InDesign, click on your document using your Picture Frame Rectangle tool (the one with the X through it).

Fill in the desired size (can be adjusted later).

Go to File menu > Place.

Find and select the Illustrator file in the window that opens.

Click the Open button.

Adjust size, & position of your image using the Direct Selection tool (white arrow), and the cropping with the Seclection tool (black arrow).

You're done!

Ace

PS: If you're new to InDesign, get the Visual QuickStart Guide by Sandee Cohen. It's a great way to get up and running quickly,

[DCurry]

Just to add to Ace's instructions:

You can skip drawing the picture frame if you want. With nothing selected, just do a File>Place of the graphic. You'll see you now have a "loaded" cursor - either click once to place the graphic, or click and drag to create the frame and place the graphic in one step.

You can also simply drag the graphic into the InDesign document from the Bridge application, or from your computer's Finder (any window visible on your desktop.)

[AdobeAce]

That's one of the great things about InDesign, there's more than one right way to do almost everything. Depending on the situation at the time, you can choose whatever is easiest.

Ace

:D

[DCurry]

Well said, Ace!

Here's a scenario I like to describe that really shows how much more efficient InDesign is:

I had a project to do where I needed to place and center within its frame about 60 images. First, I created one frame, then stepped and repeated to fill the page with my desired spacing. Nothing new there, just like Quark. Then, I arranged the document and my finder window so they were side by side. I grabbed an image from the finder and dragged/dropped into the desired picture fraame in InD. Repeated this for all other 59 images. Finally, I did a "Select All" and hit the Center Content button to center all the images in their frames. Took me all of about 5 minutes. Probably would have taken closer to 1/2 hour in Quark, and would have required many more keystrokes.

[GuyB]

Like AdobeAce said but instead of :

"Adjust size, & position of your image using the Direct Selection tool (white arrow), and the cropping with the Seclection tool (black arrow)."

just go to Object/Fitting/Fit frame to content. This will adjust the frame, whatever size it was, to the size of the image. Much faster.

[AdobeAce]

Hi All,

As GuyB's suggestion shows, there's always a number of ways to accomplish a task, some work better than others depending on the situation.

If you want to show the whole image, GuyB's way is clearly the best. If you want to crop in, other ways may be better. Or Guy's suggestion, may used to make the Frame fit the image at a certain size, and then cropping could be done manually with the Selection tool afterwards.

Another thing I do quite often is I link the width and height of the image in the Control palette so they get resized in proportion. Next, I use the Direct Selection tool to select the image, and I highlight either the height or width in the Control palette. Then I just use the Up or Down Arrows on my keyboard to resize the image 1% at a time. You can even use the Reference points on the left side of the Control palette to choose where the image will be scaled from (a origin point for the resizing). Really cool! And a huge time saver.

And as Dan's experience shows, having bunches of options on how to accomplish a task can make a huge difference in InDesign's efficiency over other layout applications.

My favorite, is being able to set up Bleed guides for an entire document in the Document Setup window when you're first opening a new layout. In a long document, this saves an amazing amount of time.

Ace

:D

[Lottmedia]

Everyone seems to have answered it well enough, so I'll edit out my answer (couldn't see all post before I posted for some reason)

I hate to say it but that's a simple action you could querry the Help files for, it's literally one of the most basic operations in InDesign. Read the manual.

Hope this helps

J-Rod

[samsaliva]

hi guys
thank you all for the great advices that u all gave to me.
it really work.\
but now for more to be asked.
as i place the ai files in indesign
i realize that there is a loss of color information.

why is there some changes in the color.

[GuyB]

Samsaliva,

For the color change, here are 3 suggestions :
- make sure the color settings are the same in both apps;
- could be a difference between RGB and CMYK;
- in ID, when you are in Overprint Preview mode, there is sometimes, with a spot color, a light shift of this color on the screen (there is a technical reason for this which I don't remember, sorry !)

AdobeAce,

Yes it's great to have multiple ways to do things and I would like to elaborate a bit on this. As for the original question of Samsaliva (how to place an image) I tend to always go as simple as possible. It's an old habit I kept from the beginning of PageMaker when it was safer (it was my printer's suggestion) to scale your images the right size in Photoshop before placing them (I even rotated images before placing them ! I'm not sure but I think I remember that, sometimes, an EPS image, rotated in PM, simply disapeared from the screen !)

Now, I know that ID is much stronger and the prepress work more reliable than at the time of PM but I kept most of this habit (for the size, no more for the rotations). I think that the simpler (cleaner ?) the file you send to your printer, the better. It's just an old habit but it always kept me out of trouble.

I'd appreciate to have your opinion on this and the opinion of the prepress guys on the forum.

[AdobeAce]

Hi GuyB,

My general rule of thumb for what I change in InDesign and what I change in Photoshop is pretty much the same as yours -- keep it as simple as possible in InDesign to assure faster output with less chance of problems.

Transformations such as rotating, or shearing I always do in Photoshop. If you leave it to InDesign or Quark to make these transformations, it will just slow down the output process especially in a long document like a magazine.

When I was art directing and producing a golf magazine, I even scaled down all the Photoshop images to 100% and updated the images in Quark (before I switched to ID). In doing this though, I always left the "scaling down" process to the very end, after I got final approval from the Publisher and right before I put everything on CD. This gave me the flexibility to make final tweaks for the inevitable client changes like -- "Can't you make all the photos much larger?"

I know the printer really appreciated the added effort we put into the process because we made their job easier and faster. It's part of what makes a great team -- Going out of your way to make everyone else's jobs easier.

I know there are some designers out there who could care less about the production issues is their layouts. After all, "That's the printer's problem." You would not believe how may times I heard this exact quote in training Art Directors and Designers. As far as I'm concerned, these artists are not doing their jobs.

Ace

[The Repro Kid]

Howdy ID'ers.

I'm not exactly the ID Kid (I wish I could use it more often but everyone-one I work for still aren't using it) but...

could samsaliva's color display problem simply be an issue with his "display performance" preferences? Maybe if he upped it to high quality display instead of the default it might look better to him?

As far as using PM style "place" as opposed to quark style picture box, if you don't need to put a border around your picture then why not use Place. It's easier. And it offers warm nostalgic feelings to do work PM style. But if your client wants to try seven different pictures, a quark style picture box will then be easier. It seems to me that not just picture placement, but many other things can be done both PM style and quark style in ID.

As for when to size and rotate photos before hand or not: modern RIPs, and computers are so dang powerful these days, you have a lot more leeway. But still it depends entirely on what you are printing. In general, I don't have problem scaling any image from 75% to 125%. This is a very safe zone even for multiple page docs like a magazine or brochure, but 100% will always result in the fastest output, so if you have 200 pages to output, the closer to 100% the better. If you have only four or eight pages, rotating in ID won't hurt, but with more than eight pages I'd rotate in photoshop.

When dealing with larger, poster size images, go for 100% and do all your rotating in photoshop.

Larger format than posters is a different story because we can start to shed dpi, and scaling above 100% is the same as shedding dpi.

With small stuff this concern becomes almost meaningless. I do lots of work for a vitamin manufacturer. Often they like to show the product at "actual size." Well if the pill is actually 1/2" and the pill artwork is 2" then the pill is scaled down to 25% -- well out of the safe zone. But do I resize it? Heck no! The art is tiny to begin with. I'll flop, rotate and scale in the layout program with complete abandon because how much over-processing can occur with a 2" image? But you still can't enlarge the small image much over 125%.

I've talked enough, I'll 'splain overprinting to guyb some-other time. ;)

[AdobeAce]

With small stuff this concern becomes almost meaningless. I do lots of work for a vitamin manufacturer. Often they like to show the product at "actual size." Well if the pill is actually 1/2" and the pill artwork is 2" then the pill is scaled down to 25% -- well out of the safe zone. But do I resize it? Heck no! The art is tiny to begin with. I'll flop, rotate and scale in the layout program with complete abandon because how much over-processing can occur with a 2" image? But you still can't enlarge the small image much over 125%.


Hi Repro,

I too, no longer pay much attention to the little stuff when it comes to scaling. But rotating, shearing, flopping still makes me a little uneasy. I guess it's just what I became used to. (Also previews of some rotated images can be a little strange.)

I worked on the golf magazine 5 years ago, so things have definitely changed.

But my main concern is best explained with an actual experience that happened while working on this magazine. I received a beautiful 1/4 page, 4 color ad from an advertiser of a golf calendar. The artwork for this 1/4 page ad was close to 90 Mb. The designer had taken the front cover of the calendar and scaled it down to about 15% in Quark for use in the ad. To me this was just plain laziness on the designer's part, and a possible problem for the printer. What if the other three advertisers on this page had done exactly the same thing in their 1/4 page ads? I had visions of the RIP getting to page 23 and just coming to a dead stop.

Would this still present problems with today's RIPs?

Ace

[GuyB]

Thank you both, Ace and Repro, for your comments. I'll come back later (next week), have no time right now.

[The Repro Kid]

Hi Repro,

...The artwork for this 1/4 page ad was close to 90 Mb. The designer had taken the front cover of the calendar and scaled it down to about 15% in Quark for use in the ad. To me this was just plain laziness on the designer's part, and a possible problem for the printer. What if the other three advertisers on this page had done exactly the same thing in their 1/4 page ads? I had visions of the RIP getting to page 23 and just coming to a dead stop.

Would this still present problems with today's RIPs?

Ace

To be honest, at 15%, the screen preview could have gone to the RIP and the final art would have looked just fine. ;) Since it was one measly 1/4 page ad, yes this was the height of laziness.

I doubt it would present a problem but I'm sure it would slow things down a lot. Except for quark used to default to throwing away data for images that had an effective resolution above 256dpi. But it would still slow things down. As for today's RIPs, I haven't worked a pre-press job in 2 or 3 years now, since the G4 Quicksilver days, and computing power seems to have exploded since then (quad G5). I am now happily working in design studios and at home, sending things off to poor unsuspecting printers, and haven't had a real pre-press concern in quite some time. Not that this has anything to do with it, but I was getting so ill from constantly being around inks and solvents that I had to get a job in cleaner environment.

But this laziness thing always strikes a chord with me. I can't help thinking about warking, when he failed the Illustrator Cert, he griped, "I draw faster and better than anyone in Illustrator, what does it matter that I don't know how to dock a Palette?" I couldn't help thinking how much faster he could draw if he did know how to rearrange and dock his palettes.

I took a lot of art history and they would stress to us that the greatest masters of the renaissance were not only masters of drawing, they were also first and foremost masters of their materials and master businessmen. You would have never have heard Michelangelo say "why should I bother knowing how to grind my own paint and size my own canvas, no one draws better than me. Why should I know how to forge my own chisels, no one carves better than me." These artists considered the recipes for creating their materials as closely guarded secrets. Their mastery over their materials is what set them apart from their contemporaries. And they wouldn't be caught dead letting someone else prepare their materials for them, except for their own, well trained apprentices, under the master's guidance and supervision.

Try explaining that to modern day designer.

When I was a design apprentice, the head designer was obsessed with production and left nothing to the printers, not even cutting of masks for knock-outs. We did it all. If the printer threw away one of our carefully cut knock-out masks and tried to replace it with their own (thinking that they knew better), he would instantly spot this in the blue-line stage, become furious, call up the printers, and demand that our masks be used. Literal heads would roll! This is how a great artist works. With compete mastery of their materials, leaving nothing to be handled by anyone else.

Now-a-days, our computers and software are our materials. If one doesn't have complete mastery over their software, how can they not view their art knowledge as anything less then complete?

Know your (art) history or be doomed to repeat the past. (Ha Ha)

[AdobeAce]

Hi Repro,

Since I first got into this business over 32 years ago at Young & Rubicam in New York, I've looked at every work experience as a possible learning experience.

I've always felt that the way to do my job best was to learn about how everyone else did their jobs -- how the best photographers did lighting, how the best directors got great performances out of the actors, what top typographers looked for when setting a headline, etc., etc.

Anyone who ever says, "That's not my job," probably is not very good at their job! Every time they say that they're missing an opportunity to learn. Anyone who thinks they know everything, knows nothing. I view my job as just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. The more I know about those other pieces of the puzzle, the better I will do my job.

Speaking of history -- The best thing that ever happened to me in my development as an art director was back in 1973 when I first started at Y&R as an assistant. I became friends with an older art director who was close to retirement. I had coffee with him every morning before work and talked about advertising. What I learned about the history of advertising was invaluable, probably more important than anything I learned in school. I'll never forget that he called himself a "Pre-Tubey" because he started in advertising way before television. What a great learning experience this was.

Ace

[G4pj]

When placing native Illustrator files into InDesign (works with pdf files too), here's a great help that I haven't seen anyone mention.

In the lower left corner of the Place dialog box, there's a check box for "show import options." Checking the box lets you select the frame size to media, artwork boundaries, crop marks, bounding box, and in addition to frame size, lets you chose to place the graphic with transparent or non-transparent background.

pj