276 Make a grid of pages from a PDF file

- I'm going to place a PDF file into this blank document, so I'll head up to the File menu, choose Place, and then choose my PDF. Now here, in this dialogue box, I'm going to turn on the Show Import Options checkbox. That way, I'll get more options for placing my file, right? When I click Open, you'll see that one of the options I get is to choose what page I want to import. This works if you place a PDF, or an InDesign file, or an AI file, you know, a native Illustrator file.

You can import a single page, or more than one page at a time. In this case, I'm going to turn on the Range button, and I'm going to say, import pages one to eight. When I click OK, InDesign loads up my place cursor and lets me place that PDF. I'll click and drag, and I get the first page. You'll notice that a preview of the second page is now loaded onto the place cursor, so I can click and drag, and then click and drag again and so on. So to place all eight of those pages, I would need to click, or click and drag, eight times, right? Well, that's going to be tiresome, especially if I'm trying to import a lot of pages, or if you want to create a grid, like a contact sheet.

So wouldn't it be cool if you could import all of the pages quickly? Now, you might know about the Gridify feature, which lets you import a bunch of pictures at the same time, and then after you load the place cursor with all of them, you start dragging, and then press the up or right arrow keys on your keyboard to Gridify the place. That is, you create a grid of frames instead of just one. It's a really cool feature, but it doesn't work when you're importing a single file, even if it's a bunch of pages from that one file.

But you can do it if you use this secret little tip, which I learned from Michael Ninness. He used to be the InDesign product manager at Adobe. Let me show you how it works; first, I'm going to press the escape key to drop all the rest of the pages from the place cursor. Then, I'm just going to select all of these and press the delete key to make them go away. Let's start over. I'll go back to the Place dialogue box, which I can do with a command D or a control D on Windows, I'll select that PDF and this time, not only am I going to turn on the Show Import Options checkbox, but I'm also going to turn on Create Static Captions.

So now, all three of those checkboxes are turned on, and I'll click Open. Once again, I'll set the range of pages; I'm just going to pick from one to eight, and then I'll click OK. Now this time, InDesign loads the place cursor with the preview, but it actually has two different files. If you look really closely, you'll see a number two in the cursor, and that number two means the images, that is, the pages, and the captions. There are two different things, images and captions. So now, for some reason, now that it thinks there are two things in the cursor, InDesign lets me do the Gridify trick.

So I'm going to start by dragging out, and then I'm going to press the up arrow on my keyboard a couple of times, and I'll press the right arrow once, and now I've got a grid of two columns and four rows. So that looks pretty good. So, I'll let go of the mouse button and voila, the first eight pages appear in a grid. Now that place cursor is still loaded, right? Because the captions are still on there. But in this case, we actually don't want the captions. We were just using them as a ruse to fool InDesign into giving us that gridify feature.

So, I'm going to come over here to the tool panel, and click on any tool. I'll just choose this selection tool, and that clears the place cursor. Now we have all those pages, and we can move on with our work. This tip is a great example of why we call these "InDesign Secrets". I mean, this isn't documented anywhere, but once you see how easy it is, it turns out to be really useful.