Expert: Candice Anderson - 3/25/2007

Question
Hi Candice!

I am designing a journal in InDesign CS2 that is to be printed at printshop. One of the articles that was submitted to me is a MS Word document. The Word document contains (embeded I think) several color figures and charts.

I am pretty new to InDesign and don't use Word often so I am not sure what the best way to proceed to get those graphics in my InDesign layout.

My gut tells me that those figures from Word can't be imported into InDesign and if they could, they would be poor quality if printed (one of the graphs looks fuzzy even in Word) and that I will have to get in contact with the person who wrote the article and see if I can get high resolution files of the figures.

Also, if I may ask two other questions....this journal is 90 pages and will be perfect bound. Do I need to make the inside margins larger because of the binding. If the final final trim size will be 8.5" x 11" and is a bleed, do I need to make the document size larger by 0.125 on each side, or does InDesign have feature to add the bleed onto a 8.5 x 11 document?

(I apologize of any of my questions are not on topic with this forum...please disregards if any of them are!!

Thank you so very much for your time and expertise!!

Jen  

Answer
hey Jen,

yep, your gut would be correct. It's pretty easy to import, just go to File, place and get the file. But...yes it will be blurry as anything. Tell that person to go into excel, where i hope they made the chart, right click on the graph and save it as a .jpg. It's still going to be blurry, but not as bad.

you could also save the word file as a .pdf, bring it into photoshop, take the dpi to 300 and see how small it is, maybe you can enlarge it through word? maybe?

bleed: go to file document setup, hit the more info tab, and set your bleeds there to .125. The red marks indicate that your bleed is set. If you plan on exporting as a .pdf, make sure that you hit the bleed tab mark button under crops and marks when you export. if you are just printing from the indesign, then you're fine.

I would give .25 to .375 gutter space on both the left and right side for the spiral, that way if the printer screws up, you'll still be in the clear.

good luck :)
Candice