Placing Your Image into PageMaker or InDesign

Adobe PageMaker and InDesign are popular page layout programs. They enable you to combine text and graphics to create multipage documents such as brochures, newsletters, reports, catalogs, magazines, and even books. (For more information on these two programs, check out PageMaker 6.5 For Dummies, by Galen Gruman; and Adobe InDesign For Dummies, by Deke McClelland and Amy Thomas Buscaglia — both published by Wiley Publishing.)

Both PageMaker and InDesign allow you to import native Photoshop files, as well as TIFF files with LZW compression. (See Chapter 3 for more on file formats.) You import the file into PageMaker or InDesign by choosing File Place or by pressing Ctrl+D (z+D on a Mac).

Tip

InDesign 3.0 supports transparency. This means that you can import a Photoshop file that has transparent areas and place it over a background in InDesign, and you don’t see a white box or hard edges as you do in programs that don’t support transparency. Instead, you see the background peeking through the transparency in all the right places. This works great for importing images with soft drop shadows and placing them on solid backgrounds.

With PageMaker or InDesign, you can move the image on the page, run text around it, and print the final pages. So, unless you want to further modify the image, you have no reason to return to Photoshop. Although you can change the dimensions and rotate or skew the image in PageMaker or InDesign, it’s best to do this in Photoshop rather than in a page layout program. Your file prints much faster and has less potential for snafus.