Exporting JPG Pictures from InDesign

One of the most amusing aspects of writing (whether it be books or articles or blog posts) is that I can research something, write about it, and then a year later completely forget that the feature existed at all. This happened to me this morning, as I was working on the update to Real World InDesign (due out RSN). New in CS3 is the ability to specify an image resolution when exporting JPEG images (or JPG, or whatever you want to call them). But when I jumped to that section in the book to update it, something caught my eye: Selection.

Here’s what we wrote in the last (CS2) edition regarding exporting JPG images after choosing File > Export and clicking Save: “To export one or more objects from a page or spread, select them before choosing Export and then turn on the Selection option in the dialog box.”

Here’s what I said out loud: “What?!”

I must have known that you can choose to export only individual page objects at some point, but that info had fallen out of my brain. This is great! If you only want one or two objects in the final JPEG, just select them first, then choose the Selection radio button. Cool.

(I use exported JPEG images in a number of ways, including making thumbnails that can be imported into other documents, creating web banners and web graphics, and making simple proofs for people that are small and easy to see without requiring Acrobat.)

Now, why don’t we have this “Selection” feature in the Export PDF Options dialog box? Or even the Save As dialog box? I’d love to be able to save one or more objects off to their own InDesign document that would automatically be saved at a page size that perfectly encompasses those objects.

I know you’re going to say, “That’s what Snippets are for.” But this is different. For example, I might be working on a layout, and I want to share a piece of it with someone else. It’d be cool to simply select the pertinent frames and export just those as a separate INDD file. After they edit it, I could import their INDD file in place of my original frames. (It wouldn’t be editable anymore, because imported INDD files act like placed graphics, but that might be okay for now. In CS4, I also want to be able to convert placed INDD files into editable objects.)

Anyway, all of this is just to say: Go back and revisit what you think you know. There’s all kinds of goodies hiding in there!