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• • May 7, 2020 at 2:05 am #1248346
    Nick Kennedy

    Member

    Imagine you have three circular frames with photos in them, each on its own layer. They all overlap each other to a small extent, rather like a Venn diagram. You want to have each circle overlap an adjacent circle and be overlapped by the other adjacent circle. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But I couldn’t do it and finally gave up. There is always going to be one layer on top of the other two thus overlapping both of them. Am I missing a perfectly simple solution here?

  • May 7, 2020 at 4:39 am #1248365
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    You are not missing anything. If you have A overlap B, and B overlap C, then you cannot have C in turn overlap A. Even in Illustrator and Photoshop this cannot be done — layers have a fixed order.

    You can, however, make a mask out of one of your circles with the Pathfinder. Put this to just the top layer; it’s not live (because that can’t be done) but it should be ‘good enough’.

  • May 7, 2020 at 6:40 am #1248435
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Mike Rankin showed me a terrific tip for this kind of thing some years ago, which I show in this short video:
    https://www.linkedin.com/learning/indesign-secrets/206-creating-intertwining-objects

  • May 8, 2020 at 7:23 am #1248725
    Nick Kennedy

    Member

    Thank you both for your replies to my query. I’m sorry it took me so long to get back.

    I was not able to make a mask out of a circular frame using the Pathfinder. I am too inexperienced, having never used this tool before. I tried ‘Object/Path/Open path’ but didn’t get any further. Thank you anyway Theunis.

    The trick from Mike Rankin worked fine. So thank you David, for this and all your other brilliant explanations.

    Greetings from Germany,
    Nick

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