Wrapping Text Around Images In Pages

Learn how to wrap text around complex images in Pages. You can make your text wrap around non-square images using a variety of techniques. You can use an alpha-channeled semi-transparent image, use an image with a solid-color background, or set the wrapping of the image manually using a custom shape.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at how to wrap text around images and shapes in Pages.
I'm using Pages version 5 and we're going to look at wrapping text around images and shapes.
Let's create a sample document. We've got it here and we're going to put in some text. 
So, I've got some sample text and I've set it to two columns under Format. I put it right here. So it makes sense that we put an image in the middle there and it wraps around it. I'm  going to drag and drop an image, a jpeg image here of a tree, and size it and stick right there in the middle so the text wraps neatly around it on both sides.
Now we've got plenty of wrapping options. We go to Format, with the tree selected, and we can go through Style, Image, or Arrange. Under Arrange I've got it set to Automatic. With two columns there is no difference between Automatic and Around. I can have it skip completely there or None. You can see it go behind it because this image actually has white here. It is a white background.
So let's go back to Automatic. We see that we can change the spacing here, how much space is around the image. In this case we might want to have zero because we already have a lot of white space there. But what we probably want to do is we want to have text neatly wrap around the shape of this tree.
How we do that is we go to Image here and we want to use Instant Alpha because we already have this nice white background so we want the text to basically follow the color there, the color white, and wrap into the image. Let's go to Instant Alpha and then we are going to have this little target thing here so we can select the color. So let's select pure white here inside the image and you can see it now wraps nice and neatly around there. We can go back in here and actually change the spacing to have it wrap even tighter around it. 
If you happen to have an alpha channeled image already, so one that is produced with semi-transparency, like I do here you can use that as well although it doesn't work very well in this version of Pages. If you put it there and select Format and you basically say I want it to wrap around automatically you think it would wrap around automatically with the alpha channel there but it doesn't do it until you set Spacing all the way down to zero. Then it does.
So you could, if you are creating your own image, you could set the alpha channel to be exactly the amount that you want to wrap around it. So I have a white background that kind of follows the shape and then set spacing to zero and you can get it to follow any shape you want if you are handy in say PhotoShop creating these types of images. 
You can also get really creative when doing wrapping. For instance, let's put the tree in here and size it to what I want and now let's create a shape on top of that. You just draw with Pen. I'm going to draw exactly how I want to text to wrap around this tree, like that. Now I've got two separate elements here. This shape and the tree. 
So we're going to take the tree and remove it. Put the shape like we want and then drag and drop the tree inside the shape. Size it and position it just like that. There we go. Now we select the shape again and go to Format and turn the border off and there we go. We've created a custom wrapping around an image.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Wrapping Text Around Images In Pages”

Ron Paris

11 years ago

Hi Gary,
This was helpful, thanks. Do you think linked text boxes will ever return to Pages?

Gary Rosenzweig

No way for me to guess. It is probably the case where Apple wants to position Pages as a home-user word processor and leave things like complex page layout to the many good page layout apps out there for Mac.

Terry Haddow

Which is a shame - because I really thought they would try to rival the business world with the latest version. I like it - but there are a few (business necessary) features they dropped.
Your videos are (as always) informative and concise. Thanks.

Comments Closed.

Wrapping Text Around Images In Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “Wrapping Text Around Images In Pages”

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