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InDesign Secrets Video: Cropping With Paste Into

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In the latest episode of InDesign Secrets on lynda.com, David Blatner shares his must-know tips and tricks for using the Paste Into feature, which he calls “one of the coolest and most important features in InDesign.” And unfortunately as David points out, Paste Into is also one of InDesign’s least intuitive features.

For example, you might not know why the feature won’t work if you simply try to copy a few objects and paste them into an empty frame. Or you might be mystified by the position of an image you paste into another frame. David sheds light on both of these mysteries. He also shows the best way to select objects you’ve pasted into other frames, as well as how to quickly remove an object from a frame that you’ve pasted in into.

lynda.com video Cropping with Paste Into

Check it out now: Cropping with Paste Into.

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher. Co-author of The Photoshop Visual Quickstart Guide with Nigel French.
  • brbarrett says:

    I am working on a “basket weave” design in which I need to paste the same image into multiple frames with each frame displaying a different part of the image.
    Is there a way to “paste into” multiple frames at once? I tried grouping them, but no go.

    • Mike Rankin says:

      If you first make the empty frames into a compound path (object > paths > make compound path or cmd/ctrl+8) then you can paste into them all at once. The downside is the compound path can have only one appearance (stroke, fill, etc), be on one layer, and so on. And there’s only one copy of the pasted image, so you can’t change it’s position in one of the subframe without affecting the others. You can drag over an entire subpath with the Direct Selection tool and cut it/paste in place. It will become independent and keep the pasted image in place. But that might not be worth the effort.

  • brbarrett says:

    Thanks! The compound path function should do exactly what I want.

  • Ian says:

    I can’t watch these lessons any more. I get a request to access my computer.
    If I Deny, video stops, if I Allow the box still covers some of the video.

    What can I do?

  • Tim Hughes says:

    Hi Mike,

    Have you come across an issue with paste into then adding effects? In a greyscale document it makes extra plates show up, they don’t have anything on them but flight check in ID and pdf flags them. Unbuilding it changes appearance. eek!

    A work around is to render the object in photoshop, however with a multi-page document x5 at pre-press stage it is too much to do in the time.

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