>Question:  Is there any way to have a shape on a white (or "clear")
>background in a photoshop file and place it into an Illustrtor or
>Pagemaker file and have it be just the image, and not the white square?
>Is this a dumb question?<

Not a dumb question, but easy to answer. Yes. You need to work with
"clipping paths" (see P327 in the manual). Essentially you will create a
path of the shape (or if already a selection, turn that selection into a
path) and then choose the clipping path command in the paths palette menu.
There are some variable there and you may need to experiment. Adobe
recommends leaving the "flatness value" blank unless there are issue.
Depending on what your output devise will be, you will need to save as
either a TIFF or an EPS. I am certain folks here have gone down this route
with Pagemaker (me Quark) so somebody else is bound to jump in.

Frank