Custom Text Wrapping With Shapes In Pages

Text can wrap easily around rectangular images or well-defined image objects. But if you want to control the text wrapping with precision or to create unusual wraps, you can use shapes.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create better text wrapping in Pages using shapes. 
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So when you want to wrap text around an image you don't always want it to wrap around the complete rectangle image. For instance, let me take this picture of a car and bring it into Pages here. I'm going to shrink it a bit and you could see it's going to use the rectangular shape of the image itself to wrap the text around it. There's a lot of white space here. Now you can use a technique here to create an Alpha Channel with all this white space. If I go to Format, Image, and then Instant Alpha I can click here and then use that white space as a transparent part of the image and then I get the ability to have the text wrap around the object itself. But this doesn't always give me the perfect results and sometimes you want to customize it. So let me show you how.
I'll Undo here so it's a rectangle like this. Let's say I want to put this in the middle here and I want to have the text wrap around nicely. So what I'm going to do is actually go to Format, Arrange, and set the text wrap to None. Now I want to go to Shape and I'm going to click the Pen tool here to write a custom shape. I'm going to draw a shape using clicks to draw dots around the image. I can draw it however I want. I can include parts of the image or not include parts of the image. Now I've got this shape here and I can use this shape here as a thing to wrap text around. So, for instance, if I were to set this to Around you could see the text is actually going to wrap around this shape here. 
Now this may already be something you want. You may not actually want to have an image in there. It actually kind of cutout a hole in the shape of an object. In that case all you need to do is go to Style, change the line to No Border, and then you end up with nothing there. But if you want to have this actually appear inside of that you can. I'm actually going to delete this original image here and drag the car into the shape. Now you could see that this is going to appear inside the shape. I need to shrink it to fit so I'll resize it like that. Done. Now I've got that image inside of the shape. I want to go back to Format, Arrange and set the shape to wrap around like that again. So this is actually a shape that I've customized. If I double click you can actually see the line there. So not only is the text wrapping around this shape here but the actual image is being cropped. So the white part outside the car is actually not appearing outside of the shape. So it's not blocking the text either. So you can actually see the gray text here. That's text that would actually have been hidden by the car if it wasn't for the fact that the car was inside the shape. 
So this next example is a little different. First I want to turn on Page Thumbnails so we can see all the page thumbnails here. I'm going to add an image to the background behind the text. So this is an image of a plane flying over water. What I want to have is the text that it's actually flowing on top of the water. But the plane looks like it's pushing the letters away. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to stretch this image here to fill the entire page. I want to move it behind everything. In order to do that I need to put it behind on the section layout. So Move Object to Section Layout. That's going to put it in the section layout for all the pages in the section. So what I'm eventually going to do is I'm going to create a new section. So page one is one section and then page two and on is another section. But I'll show you that once we're done because I want to see exactly how much text is used here. 
So, I want the text to flow around the plane. In order to have that done I'm going to create a shape. Shape, with the Pen, I'm going to draw exactly where I want the text to wrap around. I want it to go all the way to the bottom of the page. So it's not really going to follow the image at all. You can see how the area here below the plane is actually going to be pushing the text away. Whereas if I was using just an image of the plane the text might wrap up underneath here. So I can adjust all these points as much as I want and I can click off of it and then on it again. Select it as an entire object. Go to Format, Arrange. Set it to Wrap Around. So you can see how the text now flows on either side. Let's make the text a little bit more like what we want which would be larger. White to go against the blue background there. Maybe Bold. So now you can read it easily here on the background. I can take the shape here and I can go to Style and set to No Border so it's invisible. 
Now this text wraps around the plane using the shape. The plane is just part of the image in the background. Let's say we'll cut the text short right here. I'm going to insert a section break. So now this goes to the second section here. I can then go to Arrange,  Section Layout to Make Layout Objects Flexible. So now I can select the image here, you could see it's separate from the image here because this is section one and this is section two. Page three is Section two as well. So I can delete this off of that section. I can also select all this text here all the way to the end and I can make that black, there. So you could see now the reason why I waited to the end to do that was because I wanted to make sure I knew exactly where all this was going to end. 
Now another thing I may want to do is, since I'm dividing text up it's a little hard to read, so I'm going to go to Section Layout and turn this off. I'm going to select the text again and I'm going to make two columns. So Layout and Add a Column to it. That allows one column to wrap on one side and one column to wrap on the other. This actually pushes some more text over here so I want to readjust that. Put the Section Break a little earlier. Remove that section break. But you get the general idea. It's actually this shape here that is pushing the text away. Not the image at all. But it allows me to do something really creative even though I can't use an Alpha Channel and I can't use the shape of the object or anything like that to have the text wrap around.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Custom Text Wrapping With Shapes In Pages”

Kathy

3 years ago

Hi Gary, when I get as far as selecting 'move object to section layout' as described, my text document background stays white over top of the picture no matter what I do. Am I missing something? thanks! Excellent tips as always. K

Gary Rosenzweig

Kathy: Not sure what you are seeing. The background is the background, and can't be "over top" of anything else. Maybe you have some other element there?

Hi Gary, what I see is the picture appearing behind the text (as in your example above),however the text is outlined in white, and does not have the blue picture colour surrounding the text like your example. Not sure if I'm explaining it well enough. I tried to add a small screen shot but this page wouldn't let me.

Comments Closed.

Custom Text Wrapping With Shapes In Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “Custom Text Wrapping With Shapes In Pages”

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