In this week’s free InDesign Secrets episode, Anne-Marie Concepción shows you how to wrap your text around the contours of an image object. In Anne-Marie’s example, she creates a custom text wrap by instructing Adobe InDesign to wrap around the object shape, which in her case is defined by a mask that’s part of a placed image. Once you’ve established the text wrap boundary, you can actually manipulate it as you would any vector shape: add anchor points with the Pen tool, move the control handles, and generally follow the lines of your graphic element as closely as you want.
The technique that Anne-Marie demonstrates can be used for any placed graphic. For instance, let’s say I had the text below placed next to this stylized lightbulb:
As Anne-Marie demonstrates, using the Text Wrap option called Wrap Around Object Shape, I can create a boundary for the wrapping effect that’s independent from the graphic’s bounding box. Because my lightbulb is sitting on a transparent background, InDesign can see the contours and I can reshape the green text wrap boundary so the words wrap around the curves of the lightbulb exactly as I wish:
Here’s the final result:
Check out the video above or on lynda.com to learn more about the details and nuances of using the Wrap Around Object Shape feature.
Meanwhile, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has a lynda.com member-exclusive tutorial this week called Inserting pages: Understanding the Pages panel, in which he reveals how to insert new pages into your InDesign document.
Anne-Marie and David will be back in two weeks with more InDesign Secrets.
Interested in more?
• The entire InDesign Secrets biweekly series
• Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción on lynda.com
• All lynda.com InDesign courses
Suggested courses to watch next:
• InDesign CS6 New Features
• InDesign CS6 Essential Training
• InDesign Typography
Tags: Adobe InDesign, Anne-Marie Concepción, InDesign Secrets
Interested in tutorials on CA6. Appreciate any information
@Beverly, did you mean CS6? Both David and Anne-Marie have CS6 training (you can find the links at the bottom of this post under “Interested in More?” And I successfully used this technique in CS6.
If you really meant CA6 and I’m just being obtuse, please let me know!
Just wondering if there is some way to wrap text like this on shape when you convert the file to epub. Is there a tutorial for that too?
It does not work for me. I place an object with layer and mask from PhotoShop but no wrap around object shape – same rectaingle.
Great tip. It is the kind of secret buried so deep that I would never find by myself.