How Do I Place Thee?
How do I Place thee? Let me count the ways.
I place thee from File > Place, and to the depth and breadth and height
My OS can reach, by clipboard, or by drag and drop
From Finder, Explorer, or Bridge.
I place thee in the image format of my choice,
Or of my client’s or stock photo company’s, depending.
I place thee traditionally, as TIFF and EPS.
I place thee wantonly, as JPEG and GIF and BMP.
I place thee transparently, as PSD and AI and PDF.
And when placed on the page, thou patiently endures
Application of scale and crop, shadow and feather, until
Thine opacity is slid and mode blended till the end of being.
Old griefs may annoy, but they are few and easily fixed.
I place thee with a love I seemed to lose
With the software of my childhood.
I place thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if Adobe choose,
I shall but place thee better in the next version.
(Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
[This introduction to the “Graphically Speaking” chapter was excerpted from our InDesign Breakthroughs book. I just came across it again and thought it would be fun to share — I sure had fun writing it!] |
Bravo, Anne-Marie! Very charming. (And I’m sure Mrs. Browning will survive it.)
Moved me to tears.
Well, not really. But cute.
Shall I compare thee to Ms. EBB?
Thou art more funny and more humorous.
OK, now, for your next poem, how about “I wandered lonely as a style.”
I wandered lonely as a style
That floats on the side, in a panel,
When all at once I saw a file,
Unformatted text, in Arial;
Beside my page, then under my cursor,
I dragged it in, where it looked worser.
;-)
Someone else’s turn! Here’s the original.
I can’t get anything close to that.
You really have a gift for parady poems.
Oh my, oh my…
I have to admit that Anne-Marie’s “placing graphics” poem is my favorite part of the entire “InDesign Breakthroughs” book. I laughed and laughed…
Arial, Arial – wherefore art thou Arial?
Deny Adobe and refuse ITC
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I will no longer be Helvetica.
To bleed or not to bleed: That is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the PDF to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous pressmen,
Or to export for onscreen viewing,
And by opposing, send Print To die, to sleep;
No more, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and a thousand natural shocks
That print is heir to.
I think this has been my favorite thread so far :)) …I just learned of another way to place an image – with the image open and saved in Photoshop, you can drag the image icon in the title bar (Mac OS X) and drop it into InDesign. Very handy for replacing large RGB psd’s with the final resized and sharpened CMYK tiff’s!