Bizarre groups

[soilworker]

I have very little info on this one so far. I've got a designer in a remote location describing an odd grouping issue to me in CS2. I saw it once about year ago but can't for the life of me remember what it is or the solution. So, before I receive the designers file I figured I'd pick your brains.

According to her she's got one image frame that has several images inside of it that can be individually moved around and manipulated (drop shadows etc) within the single frame. The images are not grouped though, at least not in the traditional sense. Apparently when you select all the images and the frame you don't get the dashed line denoting a group. But, the frame itself still acts as kind of a mask much like a regular image frame but it just has many images inside of it.

I've been trying to duplicate this for about half an hour with no luck.... anybody have any ideas what I'm going to be dealing with here?

Thanks,
~Soilworker

[gig0]

someone copied and pasted from Illustrator into InDesign? I've seen many weird things with those type of files.

[soilworker]

I was thinking that might be it.... but all the links seem okay. But, I do recall hearing something along those lines a while back but haven't gotten to trying it yet for this one.... I'll have to experiment and see if that'll do it. I just got the files finally so let's see what happens. I'll keep y'all posted. If anyone has any other ideas let me know.

[posterized_child]

Maybe the images are anchored objects in a single text frame.

[soilworker]

....thought about anchored objects too but it isn't a text frame. In fact the content is neither text, graphic or unassigned.

I think the problem is solved now, though. I tested this and appears to be what happened. Someone laid out that particular part of the document in Illustrator, complete with linked images, drop shadows and a mask to emulate page borders (since some of the graphics hang off the page past the bleed). Then they took everything - linked images, masks etc and copied/pasted everything directly into InDesign. The mask became a sort of quasi-graphic frame which could not be removed without removing it's contents as well just like would be the case of a regular image placed in a typical graphics frame. Only there were mulitiple editable images within it..... yada yada yada, I was really tired this morning.

The only way to solve it was to use the links palette to copy the links to a new location and reimport them seperately directly in ID.

Bizarre stuff..... damned freelancers.

Thanx for you help!

[bigg_MARK]

Which selection tool is she using? The Black arrow or the white arrow? Each one does something different, it's possible she doesn't know the difference.

[soilworker]

Nope, that's not it. That's what I first considered. But, after seeing the file myself and playing around with it I firmly believe that the portion was just laid out in Illustrator etc as one of my earlier replies states and then copy/pasted into ID. It's the only way I was able to duplicate the issue and since there is no way to do it within ID I can't see what else it could be. Thanks for the input, though.