From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Understanding text wrap - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Understanding text wrap

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- [Instructor] How do you get text to run around something else on your page? For example, I want this text to run around the flower. How do you do that? Well, you need the Text Wrap panel and you can find that in the Window menu. Just choose Text Wrap. Next, you need to select the object that you want to cause the wrap. In this case, it's the image, so I'll choose that. And next you need to choose one of these text buttons at the top of the Text Wrap panel. Now, I should point out that InDesign can do text wrap, whether the image is behind the text frame or on top of it, doesn't matter. Now this first button in the Text Wrap panel means no wrap. That's what we have right now. There's no text run around going on. But if you click this second button, it means wrap around the graphic frame, the whole frame, and you can actually see the text wrap here, this light line outside the frame, it's blue because it's on the blue layer right now, just like the frame edge. Now if you want to fine tune that text wrap, you can adjust the fields down here in the panel. Right now it's set to 10 points on all four sides, but you can change that amount of space on each side. In this case though, I don't want to rectangular wrap. I want to wrap around the flowers. So I want the third button, the wrap around the object shape button. Now here's the problem. It did wrap around the image, but, unfortunately, graphics are technically almost always rectangular. So we need to tell InDesign, "Don't be so literal, wrap around what the graphic looks like." That is the shape of the flowers and we can do that by changing the Contour Options popup menu down here. Right now it's set to Same as Clipping, and this image doesn't have a clipping path, so that doesn't really help us. No, what we want is either Detect Edges or Select Subject. That asks InDesign to go in and find the edge around the image. So that looks better, but let's increase the value in this first field here from zero to say 10 points. In this case, we only get one field to work with because it's a non-rectangular wrap. So that looks good. But there are some other options in this panel that you really should know about. First, see how the Wrap To pop-up menu is set to both right and left sides. Well, sometimes that causes problems because the text will flow on both sides of the image, which can look weird. So fortunately you can change this to force the text to flow on just the right side or just the left side. In this case, I'll leave it alone. Oh, and I didn't mention the last two buttons in the Text Wrap panel. Option number four means jump over. In other words, there should never be any text on the left or the right side. And the last button means skip to the next column. This forces the text right out of the text frame. I find that both of these options, that jump over or the push to next column, are really helpful when laying out books. So it's great that text wrap forces text to run around an object, but sometimes that can get you into trouble. Let me show you what I mean. See this little frame down here, this text frame? Let's select that and zoom into 200% with a Command or Control + 2. Now this is supposed to be a caption on top of the image, but let's say I move it over here. What happened to the text? Well, if you look on the right side, you'll see a little red plus icon, which means it's overset. All the text was forced right out of the frame. And of course that's because the image has text wrap turned on. Now I want the text wrap on, but I don't want the text wrap to affect the caption here. So what we want to do is make an exception to the text wrap. Here's how you do it. While the frame is selected, go to the Object menu and choose Text Frame Options. Then inside the Text Frame Options dialog box, turn on the Ignore Text Wrap checkbox. Now when I click OK, this frame will never be affected by text wrap on the page. So these text wrap features do take some getting used to, but I love the way that the text wrap feature lets me precisely manage where my text will and won't flow on the page.

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