Wrapping text Revisited

The first advantage of Indesign I have foudn so far is in its ability to wrap text to the edge of images.

MS word can wrap to the edge of GIF format images that have a transparent background, but the GIF format is too lossy. In order to get word to wrap to the edge of .jpg images (such as are exported from my camera) I insert the images to the rear of the text, and then trace the edge of the image using the freehand line tool, and then wrap the text to surround the edget of the shape made by that line. This technique is surprisingly fast and well recommended.

In Indesign however, there are various options for wrapping text around images. One can use an "alpha channel" or an outline as produced by photoshop. The most useful option is that which allows us to have Indesign find the edge of image for us. I am using Indesign in Japanese, so I am not sure of the exact word, but perhaps "find image frame" is the name of the option in the drop down box.

One can also instruct Indesign to ignore white (or other background colour) areas inside the image but the ignore internal background area function does not work very well. There does not seem to be a way of telling indesign:

• how much internal white area constitutes an area that should be ignored.
• how white an area has to be before it constitutes background.
• it would be nice to be able to tell it to ignore all white area to the left or right.

To a large extent however the above limitations can be circumvented by increasing the border around the object which will also increase the border aroudn internal white area so that areas of white inside the image are not treated as text areas. But this means that it is not possible to wrap close to an image which contains white.