Non-rectangular text boxes and colored text boxes

[tonylondon]

I think being able to draw text shapes in any form would be a nice feature to have in future releases. It is handy, for example, for children's books. A "Turn shape into text box" command.

Maybe you should add this as a request to the Dear Xara part of the forum?

[PeteS]

This is a similar process to my previous post with similar steps but it's taken a bit further.

1. I've placed the shape I want to use for text on top of a rectangle again, but this time line it up so that it's touching the edge of the rectangle.
2. Select both shapes and subtract shapes.
3. Select the remaining shpe and go to Arrange > Break Shapes
* If you managed to get the top shape to touch the edge of the rectangle then you may have separate shapes for all of the bits remaining, if not use the Shape Tool, create nodes, select them and break at points, then rejoin the end nodes (select shape, shape tool, press tab, press return). I had to do this for both of the examples in this file.
4. Draw a text column starting at the top of the shapes and spanning the width of the shapes then enter your text.
5. Select the text object and choose Send to Back (Ctrl + B)
6. Select the shapes and enable Repel Text Under. At this stage you'll be at the 3rd row in the doc.
7. Place an identically coloured rectangle behind the text and shapes to make it look seamless (4th row)
8. Or apply a different colour to the rectangle to make it look like you've drawn a shape and filled it with text (5th row)

Of course, you'd change the blue to the same as your background colour so it would not look as obvious.

One benefit of doing this is, as Haakoo points out the text is not selectable if you're exporting a website. This way the large bitmap that covers the text is broken up into much smaller bitmaps on the page so all, or at least some of the text is selectable on the page. If you're doing this for print then this method may be a little overkill.

It may be a work around, but it works incredibly well.