Inserting Clip Art In A Pages 09 Document

Question

How do you insert clip art in to a Pages 09 document? I am new to iWork after using Appleworks for many years. I have many CDs of Nova Art Explosion Clip Art that I want to use in my documents. I can not seem to find any information on how to insert clip art. All help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

John,
Just to let you know Pages does not use .wmf and .pict is mostly history now.
*The main formats that Pages will use are:*
.jpeg, jpeg2000, .tif, .png, .gif, .pdf and .ai saved with .pdf preview.
Of the *Nova Art Explosion Clip Art* the most useful will be the vector .eps files which Pages will convert to .pdf when imported.
*Best is to open and convert the .eps clipart in Preview*
Which does several things:
1. It converts them to .pdf
2. It converts them to color managed cmyk
3. It shrinks the image selection to the image's bounding box ie gets rid of all the background and only selects the image.
4. As long as there is no opaque background drawn as part of the clipart, you will have a transparent background.
5. It will save the file as a very small .pdf file
6. The pdf file will be viewable in Finder on the *Icon Preview* or in CoverFlow, also when you view it in your *Open dialog box*.
*There are 4 ways to import the clipart*
1. Drag and drop it into Pages from Finder.
If you drop it into text it will become an inline graphic and act as it it was a character in the text, moving with the text.
If you drop it on a non-text area it will create its own image box and fill it.
If you drag it onto an image placeholder box it will either neatly fit into the image box or be cropped, however the box has been set-up.
2. You can use +Menu > Import > Choose… > browse to image > select > OK+ This will drop the image into the middle of your page view at its original size in its own image box.
3. You can make a collection of clipart in a named folder then drag that folder into the top pane of the Media Browser:
+Menu > View > Show Media Browser > Photos+
When you click on the folder in the Media Browser the contents will be displayed in the preview window underneath from where they can be dragged into the Pages layout or onto image boxes.
4. Pages has something called Shapes which you can add by going to the Shapes menu on the window Toolbar. These are native Pages drawings. They can be scaled, colored and contain text or images which are cropped by the shape.
Right at the bottom of the Shapes menu is a pen tool which lets you draw your own shapes, however it is one of the worst drawing tools I have encountered on the Mac.
Shapes can be imported from .svg files. .svg is an open vector or vector + bitmap file format readable directly in most *Web Browsers*. Unfortunately they are not directly supported in Pages, but they can be imported using svg2key into Keynote as shapes, from where they can be cut and pasted into Pages.
OmniGraffle has sets of clipart called Stencils, these can be cut and pasted into Keynote and possibly into Pages, but requires you to have a copy of OmniGraffle on your machine.
A great deal of commercial and free clipart is available on the Net, much of it substantially better than the crude, cheap looking Nova material which was mostly "sourced" from PC clipart nad has that sort of style and color palette.
ClipArt can be very good and can be very bad, make sure you select the appropriate style and format for your work. You can scour through the Nova collection for the few good examples and make your own selection converted to useful formats such as .pdf and keep them in labelled folders which you can then select from previews using large *Icon View* or CoverFlow in Finder.
You can also copy and paste clipart from AppleWorks.
Peter