My niece came to me last week asking for help creating her yearbook page for school. She had a great design for filmstrips of images (how does a 17-year old know about filmstrips) that she needed to create in Photoshop.
It didn’t take us too long to assemble the images into Photoshop files. And then she told me that the actual Photoshop files would be laid out in “something called In Design, Aunt Sandee. Have you heard of In Design?”
After I picked myself up off the floor, I explained that I indeed knew about InDesign. So I thought it would be good if we laid out the InDesign page for her.
Fortunately, I knew enough to ask her if the school was using the “purple” version of InDesign (CS3) or the “butterfly” version (CS2). She said butterfly. So I laid out the page in CS2.
Unfortunately, yesterday, when she brought the page to school they were unable to open it. Even though this is a real fancy-dancy, thousands-upon-thousands of dollars a year, private school in Manhattan, NYC, the yearbook staff only has InDesign CS.
I thought about sending a .inx file from CS2 to let them open the page. But as soon as I started to explain what an .inx file is, I heard my niece’s eyes glaze over and her brain freeze. “Uhhhh, they might not understand that.” I backtracked.
So, I exported the whole page as a PDF with no downsampling and no compression. (She was very concerned about quality. In her mind PDF equals bad quality.)
I sent her an email with the PDF with these instructions:
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OK, now, this is what you have to do to get it on the page.
Open the ID document to your page.
Choose File> Place.
Find the PDF I just sent you.
Click Open.
Now, click on your page to create the image. (You don’t have to draw anything first.)
Then, position the image in the right position.
That’s it!
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Today I got an email from her:
AUNT SANDEEE I’M AT SCHOOL NOW AND IT WORKED!!! WOO HOO THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH
loveeee ya!
xo,
liz
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What I like about the PDF is that it was simple, and it worked!
WOO HOO indeed!
This article was last modified on July 11, 2020
This article was first published on January 9, 2008
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