Except for the most obvious difference between web and print, which is that you can design print layout for one particular rendering medium/resolution/size.
It's the same reason why we don't use absolute positioning in pixels to do all our CSS layout.
Custom shapes can be very finicky in when they break or don't break certain lines. Designing such a breaking-shape for a print magazine depends not only on the shape of the image, but is tweaked considerably depending on whether it breaks on a particular word on a particular line, and how this looks in the context of the page, spacing, readability, etc. Sometimes you can see this went wrong when a text has been edited without adjusting the shape. On the web with different mediums, resolutions, fonts and rendering, you can pretty much expect this to turn out wrong a significant part of the time.
tripzilch|11 years ago
It's the same reason why we don't use absolute positioning in pixels to do all our CSS layout.
Custom shapes can be very finicky in when they break or don't break certain lines. Designing such a breaking-shape for a print magazine depends not only on the shape of the image, but is tweaked considerably depending on whether it breaks on a particular word on a particular line, and how this looks in the context of the page, spacing, readability, etc. Sometimes you can see this went wrong when a text has been edited without adjusting the shape. On the web with different mediums, resolutions, fonts and rendering, you can pretty much expect this to turn out wrong a significant part of the time.