iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Floating vs. Inline Objects

Objects are the building blocks of page-layout documents. Every object on the page is contained in its own invisible box, and you grab its box to resize, move, or shuffle it. At its most basic level, creating a page layout is about arranging these boxes to your liking—a text box here, an image over there, a table down below, a shape behind it all to add a splash of color. But objects aren’t limited to flashy page-layout documents. They live happily in word-processing documents, too, where you can use them to illustrate your text with pictures, charts, text-box sidebars, and more.

Most objects in a page layout are free-floating elements that you nudge around the page independent of the others. But you can also anchor an object within a table or a specific part of your text so that an image, for example, always appears with the same paragraph or even acts like a word within a sentence. Pages manages this distinction with two categories of objects:

• Floating objects are placed on the page independent of the objects or text around them. When you add a floating object to your document, it stays in the same spot on the page even as you add new text or other objects around it. This term might seem counterintuitive, since “floating” often means drifting or on the move, but here it means fixed to a specific location. One way to think of it is that floating objects hover in place above the page. As your text moves and shifts on the page below, these objects float ...