InDesign for QuarkXPress Users [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Placing Graphics

As in QuarkXPress, you can build placeholder frames on your page and import graphics into these frames. Instead of the Get Picture command in QuarkXPress, you use the Place command from the File menu (or press Command-D/Ctrl-D) to select an image to import into the frame. (We discuss the file formats which InDesign supports in the next chapter.)

Flexible Frames

As we discuss in Chapter 10, any frame may contain any contentyou do not need to build frames specifically for text or pictures. In fact, you have to be careful here: If you select a text frame with the Selection tool when you place a graphic, InDesign deletes the text and replaces it with the picture! As we discuss in Chapter 69, if you place a graphic when you have an active text insertion point (with the Type tool), the graphic becomes anchored in the text as an inline object.

If you don't want to replace the currently-selected picture or text, or anchor the image in your text, then turn off the Replace Selected Item option in the Place dialog box. This way, InDesign ignores the selected item and simply loads the Place gun. (Or, if you forget and the image replaces a frame's content, you can press Command-Z/Ctrl-Z to reload the Place gun.)

The Place Gun

Unlike QuarkXPress, you can choose the Place command even if you have not preselected a frame. Once you have selected a graphic in the Place dialog box and click OK, the Place command changes your cursor into either a paint brush or an Acrobat cursor (the latter if you choose a PDF file), indicating that it is ready to place a graphic (see Figure 61-1). You can then move this "loaded graphic cursor"what we've called the "Place gun" since the old PageMaker daysover any empty frame. When you see parentheses around the cursor, click to place the image into the frame.

You can also create a frame at the same time you are importing a graphic. Either click and drag with the Place gun to manually define the frame size, or click once and InDesign builds a frame to the size of the image bounding box. This freedom lets you actually build a page at the same time you are importing images, so it is no longer necessary to create a dummy layout with empty boxes prior to importing the images.

Drag & Drop Importing

In Chapter 10, we also describe how you can select one or more files in the Windows or Macintosh Desktop or in Windows Explorer and simply drag the files into InDesign. This is David's favorite method of importing images, especially when he wants to place more than one picture at a time. Remember that if you drag in a single image, you can drag the picture onto any frame on the page (even if it's not selected) to place the graphic inside that frame.

Additional Options

There's one other option in the Place dialog box that affects graphics (the other two are for text files): If you turn on the Show Import Options checkbox, InDesign displays another dialog box (after you click OK), providing specific options for particular graphic file formats. We discuss this in the next chapter. (You can also choose this option by holding down the Shift key when you click OK.)