links

Has anyone else out there ever needed to get a preview image out of InDesign and into the world-at-large when the original linked files were not available? Maybe it's just me, because it doesn't seem like an easy thing to do.

Because I edit books on graphical subjects, many of my authors actually like to write and submit InDesign files (rather than go "old school" and turn in Word docs and a folder full of TIFFs.) Until the ready-for-production draft goes off to my brilliant composition team, I really don't need (or want) to have them send along the linked files. InDesign's preview images are certainly good enough for me to evaluate a manuscript— and, frankly, passing around hundreds of megabytes of photos during the draft stage would eat up time and bandwidth unnecessarily.

I have, however, found myself on occasion wishing I could create an independent file from an InDesign preview in an emergency. Once upon a time, my answer was to take a screenshot of the preview image in situ and then paste it into Photoshop. But now I have a better solution: Create a PDF and use Acrobat's ability to extract images.

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