How to detect images with text underneath

[Ken Hjulstrom]

I'm using Publisher to lay out text and images for a periodical magazine.  The editor provides me with the article text and images, and I arrange these in the layout.  I typically insert the article text into the document first, then place all of the images for the article next, not specifying any text wrap settings, since I don't yet know how I'm going to arrange the images, and finally, I address each image one-by-one, setting its position and size, and then setting its text wrap settings, depending on where it's placed relative to the text.

Occasionally, I'll forget to set an image's text wrap settings to something other than the default setting of "None", with the result that some of the article text is hidden beneath the image.  For small images, it's difficult to notice that some of the text is beneath the image and not flowing around it, and it would be rather embarrassing if such an error made it into production.  Currently, the only ways I can detect this are to either a) Proofread the entire article, looking for syntactic discontinuities in the visible text; or b) dragging each image a bit to the right or left to see if there's text underneath.

I'm wondering if there's some sort of way for Publisher to detect this "text under image" condition, so I could be more certain that this situation isn't present in the document.  I checked the Preflight options to see if this was offered, but it doesn't appear to be an option there.

Thanks,

Ken

 

[Alfred]

If it were me, I would always specify a text wrap setting when placing an image. Then you’ll never encounter that pesky ‘text under image’ condition, and you can freely change the wrap settings later on.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

24 minutes ago, Alfred said:

If it were me, I would always specify a text wrap setting when placing an image. Then you’ll never encounter that pesky ‘text under image’ condition, and you can freely change the wrap settings later on.

Alfred,

That's actually what I do.  But there are times where I initially place an image outside of a text frame (where a Wrap setting of "None" makes sense, and later move it into a text frame, where a "None" wrap setting will hide text.  Or times where the phone rings just after I've placed an image and haven't set the wrap settings, and after the call is done, I forget that I haven't yet set the wrap settings.  I suppose an alternative solution would be if there were a straightforward way to identify all images that had a wrap setting of "None", so I could easily go through them to see which ones are in a text frame and are hiding text?

Thanks,

Ken

[Alfred]

53 minutes ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

I suppose an alternative solution would be if there were a straightforward way to identify all images that had a wrap setting of "None", so I could easily go through them to see which ones are in a text frame and are hiding text?

If there is, Ken, I don’t know about it! Perhaps someone else here will come up with a clever idea.

[walt.farrell]

It seems like detecting that would be a good candidate for an enhancement to the Preflight checking.

Until them, perhaps you could consider Placing your images into Picture Frames, rather than simply putting them onto a page or the pasteboard. It's a bit more work, of course. But if you create a Picture Frame, and set its wrap as you would normally like it, you can then add it to your Assets panel, and drag it onto the page (or pasteboard) when you need to work with a new image. The wrap setting will come along with the frame.

Then Place the image into the frame. Of course, you may need to adjust the size of the Picture Frame for different uses, or even adjust the wrap or wrap outline. But you won't forget to set the wrap

[carl123]

1. Selecting all images on a page and lowering their opacity will show you if there is any text behind it. Selecting multiple images across a 2 page spread works but I can't immediately see a way to select all images in a document.

2. Depends on how you have constructed the document.

E.g. If you have text frames that are derived from a master page. Once you have completed the document you can Edit Linked any Master page content and move the text above the images. This will not affect existing text wrapping but will show you any text which will now be now on top of an image. Note: Edit Linked is a global operation so will not need to be done on every page, just the once.