Adobe Illustrator and InDesign Integration with Layered Images [Visual Imagination #3]
Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign integrate in a cool way when it comes to images. Let’s say you have a layered image in Illustrator. When you insert that illustrator .ai file into InDesign, you can turn the layers on or off within InDesign itself. This control with the layers allows you to use the same image multiple times without duplicating it or exporting it to another format.
Here’s a screencast showing how I implemented this integration in one of my guides. (My voice is kind of soft here because it’s late and I didn’t want to wake up the kids.)
To turn the layers on or off in InDesign, select the image, and then go to Object > Object Layer Options.
In the screencast, I also noted some more obvious integration points with images between these two applications. First, you can leave your file in the .ai format (or .psd if working with Photoshop) without exporting it to a JPG, GIF, or some other format. When you insert the file as a linked file, you can continue to edit the file within Illustrator and then just update the linked image in InDesign to get the latest edits.
This integration can be infinite, I believe. I didn’t explain this in the screencast, but with my Illustrator image, the image itself was made up of about 8 separate images that reside in their own Illustrator files. Each of the .ai files is inserted as a linked image into the master diagram .ai file. This master diagram is then inserted into InDesign. So if I open one of those supporting image files (for example, the firewall icon file), and update that, the changes propagate through all other files where I’ve inserted the image.
Given this integration, if you’re using InDesign as your authoring tool (which I do for quick reference guides), I highly recommend using another Adobe suite product, such as Illustrator or Photoshop, as your graphics tool, especially if your graphics have layeres.
Another great thing about putting .ai files directly into InDesign is you can resize them there and keep them sharp.
I’ve noticed that vector images in .ai put directly in InDesign are sharper in the PDF output than if you save the images as a .jpg or .gif first and then put them in InDesign. InDesign probably rasterizes images when you export to PDF, but it manages to keep .ai images pretty crisp in the process.
Good to know. Thanks for the tip, Ben.
Now if we could see the same sort of functionality in FrameMaker, there would be much rejoicing! For now it looks like we’re stuck sucking in PDFs.
Strangely, in nearly 7 years as a technical writer, I’ve never had to use Framemaker. I use InDesign a lot, but not Frame. I keep waiting for it to die. But if Adobe did release a tech comm product that offered the same integration as their creative suites, that would be powerful.
Ben M:
Your problem probably comes from the fact that .jpg and .gif are bitmap formats. Even if you create an image in a vector format, they will be broken into pixels when you save them with that file extension.
Thank you for sharing this! A friend of mine found your blog and told me about it. Very nice!
I’m curious: This tip seems both very useful and potentially troublesome. I understand there is only one Illustrator file, linked to several pages, each page showing one layer of the whole AI file. However, aren’t all those layers still present? Does that make your image larger than it has to be?
If you had created separate files with one layer each, wouldn’t each linked (or imported) image be smaller in your final PDF (assuming you’re going to export the InDesign file)? Or does InDesign perhaps account for this upon export to PDF?
Thank you again for the insight and the excellent site!