I am trying to wrap text around graphics in a book series I am working on. I can do this in Word but havent found a way to do it in Scrivener. I have looked in the Scrivener manual and google’d my question but so far havent found a way. Using version 2.6 on the Mac.
Thanks,
Ron
AFAIK, Scrivener handles images as if they were a single character, with no layout options. So, it’d not be possible to wrap text around an image at this time.
r6d2 is right - complex layout is left to dedicated layout programs after export.
All the best,
Keith
In my case I am doing a project that involves a lot of photographs and commentary about them, word wrapping is pretty fundamental to the formatting. It seems I might be better advised to eschew Scrivener from the start, I would be interested to hear what others think, what would be the advantages of sticking was there Scrivener?
Scrivener will probably allow you to organise your project much more easily than Word.
For example: reduce the project to the individual ‘chunks’ (sections, sub-sections, sub-sections – however detailed you want to get) and write them until you’re happy with the words (with the photos in roughly the right place). Then use the Binder to move them around until you get the structure you want. That’s far easier in Scrivener than in Word. If it’s useful for this project, use keywords, collections and scrivenings to track individual arguments across the project (so you could for example see how you’ve dealt with a certain topic, even though it’s spread across several chapters). And so on…
Scrivener has a lot of organising tools which will help you get the structure and words correct. It’s essentially a drafting tool, rather than something to produce finished copy: the final formatting is meant to be done in Word or a layout program. Yes, it’s possible in simple cases to take the final output from Scrivener and submit it, but for the most part, it’s expected that you’ll have to do some tidying up. In your case, they’ll be more tidying up than for a novel, of course, but the words and structure will be right, so all you’ll be doing is formatting.
Word is also probably the worst layout program to deal with this kind of thing; its layout engine, in at least Word 2011 is awful. Even when visualising object anchors and being careful about what element you anchor to. Even LibreOffice is better for this than Word, but there are reasons people use things like InDesign professionally…
Thank you both for your useful advice which I appreciate. I now see the use of Scrivener as opposed to a layout app—I do not use Word preferring Pages—but as things progress may have to have a look at Indesign!!!
You may find Pages good enough (I think it handles layout better than Word IIRC). I only mentioned this because I had to take over a long complex project report with many wrapped images which was driving a collaborator literally insane in Word (every slight edit and a butterfly effect chaotic cascade of images fluttering all over the place), we forced it into submission clunkily in OpenOffice. This was as I say even when understanding the object anchoring system in Word intimately, visualising anchors and using optimal anchoring strategies. The other problem I remember from doing this in Word was you couldn’t add auto-figure numbers you could reference in wrapped images, not sure if that absurd limitation was ever fixed…
Indesign is like the Roll-Royce of layout systems, but you’ll have to switch into a DTP mentality for layout…