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• Up to Word Drawing & Graphics
• General Concepts
  • Inline versus floating graphics
  • Inline–Floating hybrid graphics
  • The drawing layer explained
  • Wrapping
  • Manipulating graphics and drawing objects
    • Wrapping text around a graphic
    • Working with anchors
    • Unlinking a floating linked graphic
    • Unlinking an inline linked graphic
    • Selecting drawing objects behind text
    • Rotating clipart
    • Rotating or flipping text
    • Set paste inline as the default
    • Graphics formats
      • Choosing formats
      • Creating PDF output
      • File associations: restoring
      • “Gotchas”
        • Graphics display as red X's
        • Captions don't update or don't appear
        • Graphics don't display or don't print
        • Positioning floating graphics relative to page
        • Floating objects in tables are vertically aligned wrongly
        • Linked floating graphics don't show up in Edit Links
        • Preventing layout change on different computer

Inline versus floating graphics

Article contributed by Bill Coan

Graphics can be inserted into a document "inline" rather than floating in the draw layer. When a graphic is inserted this way, it behaves in almost all respects like a text character. That is, it flows on the page the same way text flows. It honors the paragraph alignment and line spacing attributes of the containing paragraph and so on. It can be cut or copied to the clipboard and pasted elsewhere (or dragged and dropped) like a piece of text, either by itself or with the text that it is inline with.

A graphic can be switched between floating and inline states simply by right-clicking and choosing Format Picture, then:

• if using Word 97, click the Position tab and check or uncheck Float Over Text.
• if using Word 2000, click the Layout tab, select either Inline with Text or a different Wrapping option, and click OK

One nicest features of floating graphics is that they allow you to wrap your text around the visible area of a graphic, as opposed to wrapping it round a rectangle, making it look highly professional (see article: How to wrap text around the visible area of a graphic).

For information on some of the less less desirable features of floating objects, and how to work around them, see article: The draw layer: a metaphysical space (and how to bring it back down to earth)