InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide

Go back and look at the newspaper and magazine advertisements created in the 1800s. (Yes, that was before I worked in advertising.) In those ads, the text marches along in a straight line without swerving toward or moving around the images.

In those days, it was extremely difficult to wrap text around an image. Each line of text had to be cut and pasted around the edges of an image.

The paste-up artists never dreamed of setting text along a path so that it follows the shape of a rollercoaster that would have been far too much work!

Adding short horizontal rules to divide one paragraph from another was another tedious task. In fact, if you look closely at some old advertisements, you can see that the rule isn't perfectly centered in the column.

Fortunately, electronic page-layout programs such as InDesign make it easy to do all these special text effects with incredible precision.