From the course: InDesign Secrets
148 Cropping with paste into - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
148 Cropping with paste into
I find in design is generally pretty intuitive. But I will admit that there are certainly some features that are not obvious at all. At least, they're not obvious until you see them in action once or twice. For example, let's say I want to crop out this whole design, and put it into a rounded corner rectangle. Well, it's easy enough to make a rounded corner rectangle. I'll just choose my frame tool here and drag out a rectangle. Then I'll head up to the control panel and set the corner options to rounded. Let's make them really rounded, maybe like 50 points. There we go, now I've got a rounded corner rectangle and I want to put that whole design inside that frame. To do that, I'm going to use a feature called Paste Into. So first, I'm going to select everything on my spread by pressing Cmd+A on the Mac, or Ctrl+A on Windows. Next, I'm going to be cutting all of that stuff to the clipboard, but I don't want to cut the rounded corner rectangle that I've just created. So I better Shift+Click on that. Shift+Cicking deselects it from the whole group. Let's go up to the Edit menu, choose Cut, then select my rounded corner rectangles. And I'm going to choose Paste into. But I can't. Why not? Why can't I paste that stuff into that rounded corner rectangle? Well, there's a problem. You're only allowed to paste one object at a time into a frame. So you can't do all of those objects into this frame. What you can do though is, let's undo that. Go back to placing it. What you can do is, while all of those objects are selected on the page, you can go to the Objects menu and group them. That's the trick. Grouping objects makes them act like a single object. And once you have a single object, you can paste it into another object. Now it doesn't look like anything is selected on the page, but that's only because those dashed lines that indicate a group are outside the boundaries of this page. In fact I can see that by pressing Cmd+Minus or Ctrl+Minus on Windows. And you'll see, there it is. There's the group. It's selected, so once again I'll cut it to the clipboard, then select my rounded corner rectangle. And this time I can Paste Into. That's terrific, but there's a couple more things that I want to tell you about this Paste Into feature. First, if you have an object that's inside another object, you can reach in an select it by double clicking. For example, let's say I want to move this R, this graphic here. I can double click and it'll select the group inside that rounded corner rectangle. Double click again, it selects that actual object. Now I could move it or delete it or do whatever I want with it. Let's say I want to take it out of that object. Outside of the nested object hierarchy. It's easy to do. I could just cut it and paste it into place, or let's see another sneaky way. I'm going to go look in the layers panel. In the layers panel, I can see that this object is on the text layer. And I can see that because that's where the little blue box is highlighted. I'll expand the text layer, and I can see that there's a little blue box next to this little group here. So I'm going to open that, open this group, and there it is. There is that illustrator file inside my layers panel. If I want to take it out of this group, all I have to do is scroll up a little bit, or make the layers panel larger, and then grab it and drag it out. I'm going to drag it right to the top of this layer. And now it's no longer in this nested group. I can move it anywhere I want. I could even put it out here if I want. All right, let's go to the next spread. I'll press Option+PgDn or Alt+PgDn to jump down here. And I want to point out something that's a little bit non-intuitive about the Paste Into feature. I'm going to grab an ellipse. I'll just go to the Graphic Frame tool here and grab the Ellipse Frame tool. And I'm going to drag out a circle on top of these two people on the left edge here. Let's zoom in a little bit so we can see them better. Let's put this picture into that ellipse. I'll grab the selection tool and select the picture and go to the Edit menu and cut it to the Clipboard. Now I can choose that ellipse and use Edit > Paste Into to put that picture and its frame into that oval. Notice that the two people that I circled originally are inside that oval. In other words, when I use Paste Into, it place the picture in exactly the same location inside that circle. But let's undo this a couple times. Cmd+Z, Cmd+Z, or Ctrl+Z on Windows and go back to where it was. This time, I'm going to move that circle up here instead. Now, I'm going to grab that image, select Edit > Cut, come over to this circle and say Paste Into. Totally different effect. Now these two people are inside the circle. What's the difference? Well, here's the thing. Let's undo, and undo, and undo again and bring it back down here. Here's the trick, because this oval was touching the graphic, it was overlapping it a little bit. InDesign knew to put the graphic in exactly the same location. But when I move the Ellipse over here, InDesign had no idea what to do with that. So when it Paste Into, it centered the graphic inside that Ellipse. So if I wanted to make sure the two people on the right were inside that Ellipse, I would first put the Ellipse in exactly the right location, then select that graphic, cut it to the clipboard, and then use Paste Into to put it inside. And you'll see it's exactly in the right location. Now I can move it anywhere I want. Paste Into is one of the coolest and most important features in InDesign, and now that you've seen how it works, you're going to find dozens of uses for it.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
-
230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
-
(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
-
232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
-
(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
-
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
(Locked)
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
(Locked)
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
(Locked)
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
(Locked)
111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
-
(Locked)
112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
-
(Locked)
113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
-
(Locked)
114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
-
(Locked)
115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
-
(Locked)
108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
-
(Locked)
109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
-
(Locked)
110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
(Locked)
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
(Locked)
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
(Locked)
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
(Locked)
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
(Locked)
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
(Locked)
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
(Locked)
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
(Locked)
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
(Locked)
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
(Locked)
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
-
(Locked)
048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
-
(Locked)
049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
-
(Locked)
050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
(Locked)
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
(Locked)
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
(Locked)
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
(Locked)
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
(Locked)
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
-
(Locked)
028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
-
(Locked)
029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
-
(Locked)
030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
-
(Locked)
031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
-
(Locked)
032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
-
(Locked)
-
-
(Locked)
007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
-
(Locked)
008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
-
(Locked)
009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
-
(Locked)
010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
-
(Locked)