Hi all,

Contuining my delve into InDesign to amend a job we have been supplied in ID5.5, I am a little puzzled to find that throughout the layout, the company logo appears in the actual InDesign layout pages as an entirely editable vector version, as if I was working in Illustrator.

It appears small in its entirety at the corner of every page (not on a master page that I can tell), but also when it has been placed into a coloured box, and enlarged to just show a small section of the logo in an arty manner, when I select it, the vector elements of the logo (which are cropped by the box edges) appear as editable vectors - as if using a Clipping Mask in Illustrator.

How has this technique been achieved? When selected, it doesn't show as a Link in the way placed bitmaps do. Surely, should that logo change or need to be used in different colours throughout the publication, it would need changing for every instance rather than amend once and do a universal modify?

I fear I may be missing something simple.

Thanks in advance.

Jonathan

Could it be a smart object? Don't really use them so don't know an awful lot about them, but might be a pointer in the right direction.

I can't find anything that points to anything really! I haven't been supplied the logo in question as a separate Illustrator file.

My research suggests that they have copied the vector lines directly from Illustrator and pasted them onto the page, which then embeds them into the ID artwork which means should that logo change at any time, you have to change it every single time it appears on a page - or do what should have been done in the first place and just generate the different versions you need in Illustrator and import it onto the artwork the correct way.

I found a fairly old thread from 2007, and if this is the way it has been done, quite a few seem to think this is good practice because "it means you don't have to switch in and out of ID to Illustrator when the logo needs changing". Incredible! How hard is it to switch to Illustrator, make your amend (which can then be universal) or different colour version, save and import?

What if the ID document becomes corrupt and the only place you have that logo is embedded in the now corrupt artwork? Seems bad practice to me.

Of course, if I am missing something here, I take all of that back, but thanks tombolt. I hope you are well and good btw!

Depending on how complex it is - could it have actually been drawn with ID's very limited tools?

Whatever, it's certainly poor practice since such an element might inadvertently be altered and should really be linked for control and consistency...

Hi Robin,

It is a very complex logo, used in many different ways throughout the job. It shows on the layers tab, and every element of the logo shows as a separate layer with a <group>, then <path> <path> etc etc, just as it would in Illustrator.

One of the amends is to remove every instance of this logo, and fortunately it is part of a group whenever it is used, so it is just a case of selecting and deleting, but I do need to add a new logo and wanted to know if this was the way to do it or not. Seems not!

All good here thanks Jonathan. I suspect it may have been copied and pasted as you suggest. I've had plenty of freelancers do that. It seems madness to me, but then they don't really teach best practice at college! One lecturer doing it that way leads to thousands of students doing it that way.

Seems a weird one to me and surely using that method will have resulted in the operator having to change something multiple times as a result at some point, which you would hope would get them thinking "there must be a better way?"! Mind you, I also consider the importing of rgbs, jpegs and various other file formats as not necessarily the way to go....

Good to hear you are well, tombolt.