When working with books in multiple columns, you often have to span a heading across two columns – most of the time, this is only done in the beginning of each chapter, but can also occur for subheadings.
In other cases it could also be nice to be able to span a paragraph style across columns, or just a specific offset on the right and left side. For instance if you have a layout with a bigger outer margin, for e.g. column text, where you in the design allow illustrations, tables or photos to fill that extra margin out.
An example of how a layout could look, where spanning an edge of a text frame would be useful.
Currently you can do some workarounds to accomplish these things, since we know that both inline text frames and tables are allowed span the right edge of its parent text frame. So if I want a heading to span two columns, I could choose just to place the heading inside a text frame, which I place inline the text, where the heading should occur, and apply a text wrap to it.
It gets worse though, if you want to span out the left edge. We know it is easy to span simple text a little out the left edge of a text frame by adding some kind of white space before the first character and adjust its negative tracking until it is moved enough to the left. But there is a limit to negative tracking, so it cannot be used in the cases where you wish to span a heading or table out.
Instead these can be placed in an anchored object with a text wrap, that is placed "Inline or Above Line", with the full text column + outer margin width, placed "Towards Spine".
But to ease all of these workarounds, why doesn't Adobe just add a paragraph spanning option? It would be a lot easier!
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