Problems with using Paste Into

letterwoman-

I think what's driving you crazy is probably the Frame Fitting Options. Even though the two frames are the same size, if they have different Frame Fitting Options you will get different results when you Paste Into. Also make sure you don't have Auto-Fit checked in the Control panel for one of the frames.

This is a very easy trap to fall into because if you click and drag when you place art, you automatically set Frame Fitting Options to Fit Content Proportionally. But by default all new frames will have Fitting options set to None (i.e if you draw a new frame, it won't have the same FFOs as the one you placed the art into).

Select the frames and check Object > Fitting > Frame Fitting Options. Make the settings identical for the two frames, then you will get the same size and offsets for your placed art, as long as the frames are identical in size. If they are different in size, select Content: Fitting > None in the FFO dialog box for the frame you're pasting into. This will make the art go to the same offsets, but not resize to match the frame.

You can use the Eyedropper to copy FFOs from one frame to another.

This is probably worth a blog post to illustrate…

And you can set the Frame Fitting Options as part of an object style, for ease of application to multiple and new frames.

letterwoman-

To copy FFOs from one frame to another with the Eyedropper, you must have Fill:Color and Tint selected in the Eyedropper options. Double click the Eyedropper in the Tools panel to see the options. A little weird, IMO. What do Color and Tint have to do with Crop, etc? Not much.

Anyway, what this means is if you first click on a placed graphic, the Eyedropper will copy the fill color of the pixel you click on instead of the FFOs. So you have to click in an empty area within the frame to copy FFOs. Obviously that's no problem if the frame is empty, but if it's filled with a graphic, you'll have to either resize the graphic or the frame to make some empty space to click on.

Unfortunately, if you resize the frame, you change the crop offsets. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish this may or may not matter. ie, if you're trying to get art to be a specific distance from the top left of the frame, you may not really care about the bottom crop, so you could open up the bottom of the frame to use the Eyedropper.

It's all a little sketchy, but CS5 is still a huge improvement over CS 3 and 4 where there was no good way of pasting a graphic between frames.

I think once you get the hang of the way CS5 works with FFO, it's actually a lot better than CS4 or 5. At least you have more options.

If you want a frame to behave like it would in the older versions (not retain any FFO info), select the frame and choose Object > Fitting > Clear Frame Fitting Options.

Then when you paste into, you'll see one of two things:

1. the graphic will stay in the same position relative to the spread (if the new frame is within the graphic's bounding box).

2. the graphic will be centered in the new frame (if the new frame is outside the graphic's bounding box).

David wrote a post describing these behaviors: https://creativepro.com/how…..bjects.php

I still think you'd have less hassle if you define the frame fitting options in an object style, and apply the object style before you paste. It sounds like you're doing this over and over, so this would definitely be an improvement for you. You could even make it the default object style for graphic frames, so that each new frame you create automatically has those options applied.

ETA: And if all the frames are already created, you might be able to use the Object section of your Find/Replace tool to hunt them down and apply the object style, or even the frame fitting options directly.

letterwoman-

Sadly, I don't think so. It's a tease because you can select Clear Frame Fitting Options with nothing selected, which gives the impression this might hold for all new frames you create thereafter. But in my monkeying around this isn't a sticky setting. I tried creating a new frame, clearing FFOs, and placing that frame into a library to make a CS4-like frame you could re-use. But when you place it into a layout, it forgets you cleared the FFOs and acts like a CS5 frame again. I even tried creating a frame in CS4, exporting it as a snippet, and placing that into CS5. No joy. I can't even find the code in IDML that governs the behavior you get when you clear FFOs. So there's some strange voodoo behind it.

If it's a daily irritant (and orielwen's good ideas about object styles and find/change don't fit the situation), you could assign a keyboard shortcut to clear FFOs.

S'all I got.