From TIF to ICML?

Question

Hi
I need to make som changes in an old text-layout, originally made with Page Maker around 2002, later converted to InDesign. The text contains some scanned letters, since that particular font does not exist digitally.
I have the originally scanned letters as .tif´s, and I have made some new scans, using same solution.
In the .indd-file (the layout) the original letters all appear as .icml.
How do I treat the .tif´s so I can edit colour, size etc. in the .indd-file.
And how are the .tif´s changed into .icml??
(Photoshop may have been involved?)
I did make some jpg-images to illustrate the problem - is it possible to show images in this forum, and how?

Answer 1

There are two reasons I can think of that ICML can be used -but only one of 'em applies here. What you'd ordinarily do is, as a designer, "check out" stories to writers using InCopy. They could write copy to fit in InCopy (hence the name - it's a great tool for newspapers and magazines and similar write-copy-to-fit workflows) and you the designer could check 'em back in. But one-letter stories are unlikely copy-fitting tasks for writers so probably they're being used here as either a clever hack, or a mistake.
The clever hack would be this: Let's say that you have a repeating fancy drop-cap letter in your document. Your client keeps on asking for different fonts. It's getting to the point that you are really tired of manually changing the drop-cap eighty times a day when the client says "No, I don't like that font, pick another one." So what you can do is make the drop-cap once, make an InCopy assignment out of it, and then place that ICML seventy-nine times. That way, when you update the source of the assignemnt, all of the other links update automatically. (I've only used this trick once, and it was years ago, so my description may be a bit off.) So probably what happened was that someone made the drop-cap, made the ICML links, and then rasterized the drop-cap (in Photoshop?) and then replaced the source. Or maybe the source is somewhere off in the pasteboard?
Who knows? Do you need to use that trick? You say that you want to do this:
How do I treat the .tif´s so I can edit colour, size etc. in the .indd-file.
And how are the .tif´s changed into .icml??
The first part is to save the image in the correct format, with the correct absence of transparency, in Photoshop. (Peter's message at the end of that thread is the important one.) If you do that, then you can select it with the Direct Select tool (the white arrow) in InDesign and assign swatches to it to change the color. You'd change its size the way you'd change the size of any image.
If you can't find the source of the ICMLs then I'd use the Links panel to select all of the ICMLs at once (with shift-select to grab many at once) and then click the little flyout button and choose Relink... to relink all of those files to one tiff that I'd made into a one-bit tiff in Photoshop. I think that would work.