Chapter 23: Importing Pictures

Overview

Although InDesign's shape-creation tools, type-formatting options, and object-manipulation features provide great flexibility when it comes to designing pages, you're probably going to want to use other graphic elements ‚ particularly scanned images and computer-generated illustrations ‚ in your publications . InDesign lets you import graphics files in a variety of formats (see Chapter 22 for details about supported graphics file formats), and once you've imported a graphic, you have several options for modifying its appearance (see Chapter 24 for information about modifying imported pictures).

Note ‚  

The terms graphic and picture are interchangeable, referring to any type of graphic. An image is a bitmap graphic, such as that produced by an image editor or a scanner, while an illustration or drawing is a vector file produced by an illustration program.

It's important to understand that when you import a picture into a document, InDesign establishes a link between the graphics file and the document file and then sends the original graphics file to the printer when the document is output. (There is one exception to this scenario ‚ when you copy and paste a graphic into an InDesign document ‚ that's explained later in this chapter.) InDesign links to graphics because a graphics file, particularly a high-resolution scanned picture, can be very large. If the entire graphics file were included in an InDesign document when you imported it, InDesign documents would quickly become prohibitively large. Instead, InDesign saves a low-resolution preview of an imported graphics file with the document, and it's this file that you see displayed on screen. InDesign remembers the location of the original file and uses this information when printing.

Note ‚  

If you place a graphic that's 48K or smaller, InDesign automatically embeds the full-resolution image rather than a low-resolution preview. See Chapter 24 for more information about embedding graphics and about managing links to graphics files.

When it's time to import a picture, you're responsible for knowing where the file is ‚ whether it's stored on a floppy desk that your friend gave you, on your hard disk, on a networked file server, or on a local or networked CD-ROM.

Note ‚  

If you import a graphics file that's stored on any kind of removable media, such as a floppy disk, Zip disk, or CD, the link between the document and the graphics file will be broken when the media is removed. Generally, it's best to copy graphics files to your hard disk or to a networked file server before importing them into an InDesign document.