Finding the True Percentage of a Placed Graphic
At the recent InDesign Conference in Chicago, one of the most common questions at the live Q&A help desk was, “How can I see how much an image has been scaled?” After all, if you scale a graphic frame with an image in it, the Control and Transform palettes always display 100%.
It’s a frustrating problem, but it has a very simple solution: Click on the image with the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow tool). That gives you the image’s scaling percentage, even when the frame itself has reset to 100%.
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I would love to see the “true image scaling” percentage reported in the Info palette when you select an image with the Selection tool. After all the Info palette shows tons of other info about the image itself, why not scaling? David, please get right on this.
I completely agree with you, Anne-Marie. It’s one of InDesign’s rather odd quirks that I’m hoping Adobe will stamp out in CS3.
(Please note that Anne-Marie was kidding when she wrote “get right on this.” She and I do not work for Adobe!)
Should I remind ones that the percentage value of a picture means nothing, especially in a high resolution workflow for press printing ? What matters the most is the EFFECTIVE PPI value. The percentage value is OK when you know the resolution of the pictures you are importing, it’s useless if you don’t know the resolution of all the pictures.
I agree, Branislav: It’s important to keep the Info palette open so you can see both the native image resolution and the effective resolution after scaling. However, I also want to see the image’s percentage scaling. For example, if it is vector artwork, the resolution doesn’t matter, but I still may want to find out how much someone scaled it.
Why not use ScaleAlert from knowbody.dk? It’s for free and you can determine a range of a) the scaling and b) the effective dpi’s.
So you can see if a vector graphic with hairlines has been scaled to 5 percent ;-)
dear sir plz imormation me designing photoshop
Does anyone ever run into this problem: you place a graphic. Select it with the white arrow, and it says 20%; select it with the black arrow and it say 80%.
Why does this happen and how can I get this not to happen?
Is there a way to get InDesign to round up or down to only 3 decimal points in sizing? Normally, I change it manually but this is time consuming in a project with hundreds of illustrations.
Leslie: No, I don’t think so. But does it really matter if it’s 98.356% vs 98.356134%?
Hi David!
I know this is an Indesign “place” but by any change you know if this is possible to do in Illustrator. I use it very often in Indesign but I haven’t find the way to do it in Illustrator… don’t know if it can be done.
Thank you