Lisa asked:
I draw up a set of charts in Illustrator and place them all into my InDesign file at 100% so that font sizes all match, alignment is spot on… Then, one of the charts needs an extra bar added, so I extend the illustrator artboard to the right and add another column. On returning to InDesign and updating the link, InDesign decides to shrink said chart to 94.5696% (or whatever) to fit in the existing image container. Please help, I’m going out of my mind!
This has been an annoyance for InDesign users for many years: When you relink to an image and the image size has changed — even a tiny bit — InDesign scales the image up or down in the graphic frame so that the new image takes up the same amount of space.
For many people, that’s exactly what they want. For example, it’s terrific when substituting a highres image for a low-res FPO. Or, if you’re swapping out one image for another in a frame after you’ve already laid out the page.
But in your example, it’s a disaster! You need the scaling to remain the same.
The solution is far simpler than you might fear: It’s a preference. That’s right, all you need to do is open the Preferences dialog box (Command/Ctrl-K), click the File Handling pane on the left, and turn off the Preserve Image Dimensions When Relinking checkbox.
Now you have control! You can master your future! But with power comes great responsibility… or something like that… ;)
This article was last modified on December 21, 2021
This article was first published on July 21, 2011
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