InDesign® CS4 Bible

Chapter 25. Importing Graphics

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Preparing files for import from graphics programs

• Understanding special considerations for supported graphics formats

• Working with files across platforms

• Understanding color issues

• Using the Place dialog box to import graphics

• Specifying import options for various graphics formats

• Exporting graphics

• Working with imported graphics' layers

• Figuring out other ways to import graphics

You can import graphics of all sorts into your InDesign documents several ways. InDesign is particularly adept at importing graphics created in popular Macintosh and Windows formats. And through the Mac and Windows Clipboards (copy and paste), you can import file formats — to a limited degree — that InDesign doesn't directly support.

Because InDesign has some built-in graphics features, as I describe in Chapters 26 and 27, you may be tempted to use InDesign as your graphics program. Don't. Its tools are fine for some work, such as creating shapes that text wraps around, borders, and gradations of color — but InDesign is not meant to be a professional graphics-creation tool. In fact, it's designed to work closely with such professional tools, especially Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop.

Particularly for bitmap images such as scanned files and photographs, InDesign has few capabilities to apply special effects or otherwise manipulate the image's content, so you should do as much work as possible in your image editor before importing the file into InDesign. For example, ...