greyed out contour options with pencil tool

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
August 6, 2025
2 replies
269 views

Hey everyone. I'm having some new trouble with text wrapping, specifically with the pencil tool. I have other options to accomplish what I want, but I'd like to fix this issue.

For whatever reason, the contour options are greyed out when I select to wrap around a pencil line. This has never happened before; it always gave me options to wrap around a drawn line, say for a png image that I couldn't "detect edges" for to wrap around as you can with a jpg. It doesn't matter which text wrapping selection I choose—no contour options show up. Any insights?

rob day

Community Expert

Hi @AJ12170409 , Contour Options become available when you are wrapping around a placed object. Here I have a Placed .PSD file and I get the option to use the .PSD’s transparency as an Alpha Channel.

If I draw a shape in InDesign Contour Options is grayed out—the native shape is all you can wrap to:

A

AJ12170409Author

Inspiring

I know it works for objects, but it USED to work with pencil lines as well. And now it doesn't.

rob day

Community Expert

My capture of the Pencil path is from ID 16.4

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @AJ12170409,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing your observations. I tested this on my end using InDesign versions 20.5 and 19.5.4, and I saw the same behavior. The Contour Options stay greyed out unless "Wrap around object shape" is selected in the Text Wrap panel. Once that specific option is selected, the contour settings become active and editable.

Could you please confirm which version of InDesign you're currently working with? And just to clarify, when you selected "Wrap around object shape," did the contour options become available for you as well? If they did, then this is expected behavior.

Let me know how it's going on your end.

Looking forward to your update.
Abhishek

A

AJ12170409Author

Inspiring

Thanks for the response 🙂 No, they stayed greyed out, which was the issue I was facing. Normally, they show up no problem, and I had literally used that feature days prior. Yesterday, it just stopped working. I am using version 19.5.4 (and choosing not to update because I have had issues with other features in newer versions and have had to backtrack to this prior version twice).

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