Selecting in CS5 illustrator

Question

Hi,
I have upgraded to CS5 from 10 and am finding it a little less behaved, for me, my fault i"m sure.
I am having the wierdest time copying and pasting the actual drawing into ID CS5 without a huge surrounding box which is awkward and bothersome.
What am I doing wrong here?
I would update all the old files into CS5 but there is some sort of assumption that I have stolen fonts and also I can't seem to make it into a new file at greater than 72 ppi. Why anyone would draw in illustrator at this low resolution is a mystery to me. Is there a preference to bypass this behavior?
Thanks,
Garrett

Answer 1

Copy and paste is the way I've been doing it for to many years to want to change.
There's nothing wrong with copying from AI and pasting into InD, as long as you understand:
What you paste will be converted to native InD objects fully contained within the InD file; therefore will enlarge the size of the InD file. Perfectly fine for small, simple spot graphics, but can quickly bloat the size of a page-layout file if done indiscriminately. There's good reason why page-layout programs are designed to rely heavily upon external links.
The nature of what kind(s) of content you are copying/pasting and the attendant ramifications. For example, if you have applied a live raster effect to the something copied from Illustrator, then what you paste into InD would contain a raster image--and that may account for the larger-than-expected bounds. That's part of what Scott was alluding to. That's why it's important for you to fully describe what exactly you are doing, what kind of objects are involved, what OS you are using, when asking such questions.
Editing an already placed drawing is an interesting idea but I would not want to have this this kind of update idea happen without my control over it....
Can't imagine it ... Sound like something from a committee to support the bridge.
There is nothing newfangled about importing externally-linked files and their being updated in the container document when changes are made to the external file. The practice dates back to the beginnings of 'desktop publishing' in the 80s. An externally-linked file is read in again whenever the receiving document is re-opened or exported, or printed.
Even the much ballyhooed 'Smart Objects' feature in recent versions of Adobe apps is of little more consequence than the 'hot links' and 'edit with...' or 'edit original' features common in other graphics programs, the basic function of which is essentially just to allow you to specify a preferred program as the default editor for imported objects of particular types, and an OS call to lauch that program and open the object.
...but I would not want to have this this kind of update idea happen without my control over it.
Actually, the update wouldn't happen without asking.  ID will notice that the illustration has changed and will ask you first if you want the updated picture.  It's actually pretty powerful that all the tools work together like this.
In InD, you would be notified of the discrepancy if the external linked file is changed. But that doesn't necessarily mean you can then just choose to disallow the update and everything will be fine. If the external file has been edited and saved, InD cannot magically "revert" the changed file to its previous state; and it's an external link, so InD hasn't stored a version of it in its previous state. So of course you have to be aware of what you are doing. But again, there is nothing new about any of this. The basic principles predate the very existence of InD by decades.
JET