I am trying to format a book for print in Word and even though the pictures and text are supposed to be “anchored” they still move all over the place in Microsoft word,- I finish doing some work in Word and come back later to find stuff has moved all over the place and am getting very frustrated and am considering using a different program -Does Libra do this or is it more book formatting friendly where you can “lock” things in place?
thanks
This site is for questions and answers about LibreOffice. If you need any help on Libra (what ever it is), go to a respective resource.
@gabix: Libra is a frequent typo for Libre from Latin-based speakers, like Spanish or Portuguese languages. The question may in fact be related to LibreOffice. Don’t be too harsh with newcomers.
Writer offers several anchor methods: as character, to character, to paragraph and to page. The latter is not recommended unless you fully understand the design and its consequences.
As character transforms the insert into an oversized character which becomes part of text flow, just like any other character. The insert will follow paragraph formatting, always remaining in the same relative position with regard to other character.
To character and To paragraph are similar, though To character is a bit tricky to associate the insert to a specific character in the paragraph (and editing may cause it to revert to To paragraph). Conceptually, To paragraph is equivalent to anchor it To character before the first character of the paragraph.
The anchor defines the base position of the insert. If the paragraph moves to another page (due to edits), the insert will also move to the paragraph page. However, the insert may be located to a position apparently not related to the paragraph if you play with the position parameters. Only references containing word Paragraph in their description will really position the insert in the very vicinity of the paragraph. For example, if you choose Entire page and At top, the picture is placed at top of page containing the paragraph, no matter if the paragraph is near the top, in the center or at bottom of the page. Formatting possibilities are nearly infinite.
To page is not recommended because it locks the insert to a specific page (e.g. to page 13 if page 13 is current at time of insertion and it remains anchored to page 13, no matter what happens to the document, even if it shrinks to 5 pages containing text).
If you set all the parameters every time you insert a picture, this is not user-friendly. Writer offers frame styles where the style contains user-set parameters. You apply the style to the picture just like you would apply a paragraph style to a paragraph. Thus you tune the parameters once and apply the style to all occurrences, with all the advantages of style-controlled documents.
Of course, pictures will not jump all over if you save your document in a format which understands frame styles, i.e. .odt. If you save .doc(x), be prepared for picture bouncing!
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2019-11-17 EDIT only fixes typos
thanks for the reply…
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