*** From the Archives ***
This article is from July 18, 2006, and is no longer current.
Greetings from Vectorbabe! (Sandee Cohen)
Wow, my first blog post for InDesign Secrets! I’m so excited my fingers can hardly type correctly.
David and Anne-Marie have graciously allowed me to post my own thoughts and tips and whatevers. With those two ID gurus on board, I figure I should cover more of the interactivity of the entire Creative Suite family. (After all, Steve Werner and I have co-authored Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2 which covers how the apps work together.) So, here’s my current whatevers:
A friend told me the other day that she wanted a way to get the layers from InDesign into layers in Photoshop. She wanted Adobe to make some sort of translation between those apps. I told her it ain’t gonna happen. Not only does InDesign have a slightly different text engine, buy there are too many other things to overcome.
She said that text wasn’t important to her. But she has been using ID for compositing of her Photoshop files and wanted a way to easily get those compositions into Photoshop with layers.
“Ahhhhh,” I said. “Think Acrobat!” All she has to is save out from InDesign as a PDF. InDesign can convert its layers into PDF layers.
“But Photoshop doesn’t open PDF files with the layers intact.” I can hear you all saying.
True, but Illustrator does. (They don’t call me Vectorbabe for nothing!)
Let Illustrator open the PDF and then use Illustrator’s Export command to convert the document into a Photoshop file. All top-level Illustrator layers will be converted into Photoshop layers.
I’ll be posting again soon, with another interactivity tip for the Creative Suite applications.
However, I’ve got to stop writing. It’s 94-degrees here in the Big Apple and my Beziers are drooping!
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VectorBabe just ROCKS!
Glad you join David and Anne-Marie on this blog…
I’m so glad to have you here, Sandee! Great tip. I’m not even going to touch that comment about your Beziers! ;)
My understanding is that Illustrator doesn’t always get InDesign’s layers in the proper place… that is, they aren’t always converted to “top level” layers. Yes? If not, is there anything we can do about that?
I’m not too sure I understand your question, David.
InDesign sends its layer info to Acrobat. It’s Acrobat that then displays ID’s layers.
Illustrator then reads those PDF layers.
I haven’t heard of Illustrator not recognizing those PDF layers correctly. Can you give me more information so I can research it?
What we really need is an option in Photoshop to be able to render PDF with layers as separate layer in photoshop. In fact, photoshop shall ask what we want to do with such PDFs.
a) merge all layer and render
b) render all layers as separted Photoshop documents
c) render all layers as layer in one single photoshop.
That would be amazing…
John Nack if you are reading this blog, please take this into consideration for next Photoshop.
I’m confirming the behavior David pointed out. Here’s the deal:
1) New ID document with 4 layers.
2) Add a color-filled box to each. Distribute to layers.
3) Add a drop shadow to a couple of them just for fun.
4) Add a text box with some filler text on top of it all.
Export to PDF (make sure to set it to PDF 6 compatibiliy or higher to get options for layers).
Open In AI and get one ‘Layer 1’ with a mish-mash of groups and subgroups, but no distriburted layers.
FWIW, I have been using ID to quickly comp together websites and have been looking for the Holy Grail-method of getting them (once approved) somewhat directly into Photoshop for further/final manipulation. I had been hiding ID layers, exporting to PDF and then bringing the various PDF’s into Photoshop. Very time consuming, anti-aliased edges where hard edges were desired, etc. I was hoping this might be the Holy Grail.
Alas. It seems I’m *so close* though!
I’m so ashamed of myself. I apologize.
I was wrong. Wrong. WRONG!!!
Here’s the deal. I am so used to opening Illustrator and sending objects that are all munged together to their own layers (Layers Palette> Release to Layers (Sequence), that I complete forgot that step in my technique.
I apologize.
I am embarrased and ashamed.
Please forgive.
This is Sandee’s co-author on Real World Adobe Creative Suite.
It’s sad that Illustrator CS2 DOESN’T have the ability to read layers from PDFs.
It can read its own layers back if you round-trip Illustrator files with Acrobat, but you must make sure you Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities. It can read Photoshop layers. But not PDF layers. Yet.
We can hope the next version gets that ability.
There is another way, thoug it is a roundabout way to get the desired results. You could export each layer as a seperate PDF or EPS. Then rasterize them in sequence and drag the various layers into one document in order. To get around the manotony of doing this the process could be automated with AppleScript (or javascript or visual basic). The added benefit of doing it this way would be that you don’t have to deal with the Illustrator parsing of the PDF, which in my experience can mess with the way the text looks on the page.
Thanks VB,
I’ve been trying out windows live maps’ Map Cruncher program and wanted to overlay a PDF on the maps. Only thing is that the PDF has lots of ugly things on the side that I wanted to get rid of. So thanks for the advice!
Paul.