Is there any way to wrap text around pictures?

[ecbritz]

I don't find a way to wrap text around a picture in the Sigil editing window. Is there any way to do this? (I don't know HTML encoding yet.)

[Toxaris]

Then start learning. If you want to do nice things, you need to learn HTML/CSS to do it...

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by ecbritz

I don't find a way to wrap text around a picture in the Sigil editing window. Is there any way to do this? (I don't know HTML encoding yet.)

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Then start learning. If you want to do nice things, you need to learn HTML/CSS to do it...

Toxaris is right, but I'll expound a bit on his answer

Firstly, you have to decide if you *need* wrapping and other fancy effects. They can look nice, but there is a great chance that they won't work on arbitrary reading devices and software. Keeping pictures and bylines in separate paragraphs is a good way to ensure that it works passably well on any reading devices, including small screens such as cell phones. This is important if your epub is for generic use by the public. Especially, stay away from dropcaps and similar effects, it's basically impossible to do it properly.

That said, to do it you need to delve into the code, as Toxaris said. You need basic html+css knowledge. There are a lot of tutorials on that around, I won't recommend a specific one since it's a lot of years since I used one myself, but Google is your friend.

Then, look at existing code that works, borrow it, and learn from it. There are many good candidates in the upload section here. This one is a good start. The user Jellby is an artist in this respect, the illustrated epubs made by him push the limits of what's possible while maintaining good coding practices, but it's difficult to pull off. Search for them among the uploads.

Good luck!

[ecbritz]

I must say I'm impressed by Three Men in a Boat. I have a way a faking text wrapping around a picture, but this Three Men in a Boat book is awesome.

[exaltedwombat]

Don't try to be TOO clever. If you float a picture to the left, text to the right, some devices will display what you want, some will ignore it and put the text after the pic. That's acceptable. Anything more complicated may just display as a mess.

[teh603]

Best I can think of is trying to do a trick using invisible tables. The wrap will be blocky, but it should work. Provided that ePub supports tables in the first place, that is.

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by ecbritz

I must say I'm impressed by Three Men in a Boat. I have a way a faking text wrapping around a picture, but this Three Men in a Boat book is awesome.

Indeed. But don't forget to try it on a range of devices, or even run it through a Kindle conversion. That's what real-life ebooks have to survive.

[townsend]

Here's that sample book, Three Men in a Boat, that Ecbritz mentioned, with some good examples of warping words around pictures.