To entice people to read a text, we can present a short, attractive excerpt as a quotation. That means we pull out some text. In a two-column layout, it's looks nice to put the quotation into a window in the middle of the page between the two columns, with the regular text flowing around it. It's also a nice way of embedding images.
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:
Download the
pullquote.dtxfile from http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tex-sx/tex-sx/development/view/head:/pullquote.dtx or from CTAN, once it's provided there too.Click on browse files...