How to do it...

One possibility is to use the shapepar package to cut out space from the text, like in the previous recipe. However, it would be a bit challenging doing it twice, once for each column.

The pullquote package provides a solution. It can typeset a balanced two-column text layout with a cut-out window. This can be filled with text or an image. The shape is arbitrary.

We will use dummy text and highlight a quotation from Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX:

How it works...

We loaded the lipsum package, which gives us filler text. Then we loaded the pullquote package. We defined a macro, which prints the quotation.

For our example, we made a paragraph box with lines above and below, printing italic text and the author's name at the right. To avoid undesired white space, we commented out the line breaks in some places by putting a % sign at the end.

In the document, we simply made a pullquote environment with that macro as a pulled object within the argument, and lipsum text for filling the surrounding space.

The pullquote package does the rest for us. It does the following things:

There are some restrictions. Mainly, the text within the environment should be simple paragraphs of text. This means that lists such as itemize, displayed math, section headings, and modified vertical spacing in general, are undesirable. Such non-simple elements may trouble the calculation. However, it's already great for images and text boxes.

There's more...

The key=value list in the argument of the pullquote package understands further parameters. Besides the default rectangular shape, there's a circular one. We can specify it via the shape option. The following example will demonstrate it. We will create a TikZ picture to have an actual circled element to place in. So, we need to load the TikZ package as well.

You can verify it with this sample code, similar to the preceding code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pullquote}
\usepackage{tikz}
\newcommand{\mylogo}{%
  \begin{tikzpicture} 
    \node[shape=circle,draw=gray!40,line width=3pt,
      fill={gray!15},font=\Huge] {\TeX};
  \end{tikzpicture}%
}
\begin{document}
\begin{pullquote}{shape=circular,object=\mylogo}
  \lipsum[1]
\end{pullquote}
\end{document}

The code will produce this layout:

TikZ is a very capable graphics package. You can read more about it in Chapter 9, Creating Graphics. We could also have used a circular image instead. For this, refer to the recipe Shaping an image like a circle in the next chapter.

For arbitrary shapes specified by shape functions, refer to the package manual. It also explains image inclusion support with the shape=image list. Then, the cut-out dimensions would be calculated from the image dimensions. For this, the free ImageMagick program would need to be installed on the system, since it would then be called internally.