Creating an image/logo in Pages

Not directly from Pages, but you can do it with the software on your Mac. Export or Print your Pages document as a PDF & open that PDF in Preview or choose Open PDF in Preview from the print dialog. Use the selection tool to select the area you want. You can also select & copy the image in Pages & then go to the File menu in Preview & choose New From Clipboard to make a new file. You can now save the image in several different graphic formats. I suggest using .png rather than .jpg. .jpg is a "lossy" format, .png will be much clearer.

Chris,

You can select the 2 objects, copy them, then switch to Preview, go cmd N to create a new document with the objects and save it to whatever format you wish.

Just remember that for some reason only known to Apple iPhoto will not accept the standard OSX format of .pdf, which otherwise would be the ideal format.

When you create logos they are nearly always best as vector .pdfs which can be readily scaled without blurring, are very small files and can have transparent backgrounds.

Graphics created in Pages tend to defeat most of these points. pdfs from Pages include a white background, tend to be oversize and of indeterminate color values. You are best recreating your logo in a vector drawing program even if you have some bitmap elements in it, just to keep the fonts sharp and to ensure that the colors are known values preferably in cmyk.

Peter

Select both objects and in the menu select Arrange > Group. To make it to jpg is another store which you've already got answered.

Whether or not the PDF has a white background may have more to do with the app being pasted into than Pages. For example, copy from Pages, Command-N in Preview, Copy in Preview and paste into Pages, any other iWork app, Office, and others and the droppedImage.pdf that's inserted has no white background. There may be some apps that don't recognize the pdf with the transparent background properly, but Pages is sending an image with the proper transparency.

Kyn,

If you print to pdf you will get a white background. In Print to pdf Pages generates 2 white backgrounds for some odd reason, perhaps one for the page and one for the bounding box.

I would check carefully exactly what you do have with the method via Preview.

Zoom right in to check the resolution and whether or not it has gone to bitmap and/or retained any of the vector information. I'd also be concerned whether any fonts used were embedded in the pdf and what color mode it is in. I suspect the later will be rgb.

Peter

When you create logos they are nearly always best as vector .pdfs

Absolutely.

the colors are known values preferably in cmyk

Nope, wrong way -:).

Input into a linear RGB non-device colour space (linear meaning that R% = G% = B% defines neutral gray without any colour cast whatsoever e.g. Generic RGB Profile) and let the colour management system convert to non-linear RGB device colour spaces for displays and printers, and non-linear KCMY, YMCK, CMYK, CcMmYK device colour spaces for printers and presses.

/hh

Ah, there's the difference! Some apps allow you to set the "color" of the page. Changing the Opacity to zero makes even the Print PDF come out with a transparent background. I used this awhile back when Comic Life didn't allow you to copy images to other apps. The iWork apps don't allow you to set the background color, though, so every page that's printed to PDF comes with the white background.

In order to get around this, you Copy from Pages, do Command-N in Preview (the image on the clipboard has no background, so it's transparent) and, to store the image for later use, you can then save as a PDF. If you compare what you get from Print to PDF and Saving a copied image, you'll see that Print to PDF gives the white background (plus the ENTIRE page that you'll need to crop) and passing the image through Preview will yield a PDF image with a transparent background AND already cropped to the size of the image.

In checking what gets pasted into other apps AND what gets saved as a PDF, you retain access to the full smooth scaling of PDF images. As large as you want with no jaggies. The Font question is an interesting one. I've used this for myself (so I have all the right fonts) and have sent PDF images to others that saw what they should see, BUT can't remember if I'd ever included any odd fonts for a test. And, interestingly, there's no color profile listed in Preview for PDF's the same way it's listed for a bitmap. Never noticed that before 🙂

Kyn,

Isn't Comic Life brilliant!?

I particularly loved the clever way they worked out how to manipulate the tongues of the speech bubbles. It intrigued me so I printed samples from Comic Life files to pdf and examined them in Illustrator.

So simple but clever. I see the same thing done badly in many other similar settings.

I use Preview for converting nearly all my postscript files to pdfs because of its compact conversions, generally the smallest pdfs available. Also it trims the pdfs to their bounding box which is the way it should be, providing the largest possible preview in Finder and other apps and letting you quickly work to scale placed graphics.

Peter