Alignment of photo attributions are inconsistent

Version: 7.3.2.2 / LibreOffice Community
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Hello, I hope I’m doing all this correctly.

I’m working on an ebook and have many photos requiring attributions below. My problem is some are placed tightly below the photo (my preference) while others are a full line space apart. I’ve attached an example.
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Thank you,

attributions too far from photo.docx (308.3 KB)

Without looking at your file now, I can only advise you, if you work with LibreOffice, don’t save the file in DOCX format.


And why don’t you use LibreOffice’s “Insert caption…” function?
Right-click on the image and select “Insert caption…” in the context menu.


Sample with LibreOffice Writer labeling system:

76329 HB attributions too far from photo.odt (354,5 KB)

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Thank you for your suggestion. I don’t know all the ins and outs of LibreOffice because except for this document, the work I do in it, is usually for personal use. I’ll try it and get back to you.
The formatting for ebooks requires Word or its equivalent.
cheers,
s

Wrong! If your target format is .epub, this is an open format and Writer can export to .epub.

Your captions have received different paragraph styles, namely Style2 and Style6 which have different “Spacing above” attributes.

If you didn’t create these styles (which is likely considering their names), this is a result of conversion/translation from DOCX to ODF where direct formatting often causes creation of many one-use-only styles.

Documents with graphical material are the most difficult to format so as to achieve what you want. Road to success goes through extensive use of styles, not only paragraph and character, but also frame styles.

If you are eager to avoid formatting nightmare, follow @Hrbrgr’s advice and work in native .odt format. Only this format knows of frame styles. Only this format guarantees stability of your document (preventing loss of information by constantly converting to and from DOCX).

And since you have text which must always remain attached to the images, use Insert>Caption. Study the really cool Writer features in the Writer Guide.

PS: your sample document is plagued with direct-formatting. This will make your life very difficult. You also insert your images As character. Think twice about it. This may be correct if your image is “stand alone” in its paragraph with no other information (in particular, no caption). But since you need a caption, a better solution is to insert To paragraph with a specific frame style, then Insert>Caption and assign another dedicated frame style to the composite object image+caption. This object is anchored to the paragraph you designated and will move with it. Therefore, it illustrates this paragraph text which could contain a description or explanation of the image and you know the image will always be in the vicinity, no matter what happens to document formatting.

Thank you for all this. I did not format the book or photos initially; I paid someone to get it ready for uploading. I’ve simply been following during my revisions what was previously done. I will try this and get back to you.
cheers,
s

I’ve been testing these suggestions. I have added the attribution into “add caption” but I am not happy with that format because it limits the width of writing to the width of the picture which for some will move to a second line (see attachment). Most credits would remain on one line but not all and I am not allowed to shorten them any further than I have.

Another issue is that since I set the pic to “paragraph” it has locked itself to the next text line. I am neither able to change setting back to “as character” nor can I insert a line space between pic and text.

And I am now unable to switch to Style 2 - which is what the body of text is set to. Style 6 was used for the smaller font size for attributions.

If I were to work in ODT with all its advanced features, could I then create a copy into Word and have the book transfer over evenly?
thanks,
s

attributions too far from photo.docx (217.2 KB)

I won’t look at the new sample file because it is .docx. As previously mentioned, the conversion occurring when opening or saving the file damages any advanced formatting you may have created. My suggestion about other anchoring mode(s) works only if you stick to Writer paradigms. Exporting from ODF to any foreign format will cause loss of information and mess up your formatting. On simple documents, this is nearly invisible but the internal structure, i.e. the styling, has been damaged and a round trip will not restore it.


Caption width is not limited to image width. It is quite tricky. You start with the image (contained in a frame which dimensions are set to the image). Insert>Caption will create a composite object made of an outer frame containing the (inner) image frame and the caption paragraph. Initially, the outer frame has the same width as the inner frame, but you can resize it.
It can be resized by hand but with 10+ images document, this is not practical. It can also be resized by applying a dedicated frame size (whose width has been set in the style, sufficiently large to accept your longest caption).

But, be aware that all these user-friendly, advanced, versatile features will not survive an export to .docx. Or more precisely, you can get an exported document not too far from what you designed, but never never (repeat it seventy seven times) edit it back. Keep your .odt document as the only source for your work.

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All this sounds very complicated and if I’m understanding the 10+ images to mean if I have more than 10 images within the document, which is the case for me, it won’t work. And as I have a deadline I don’t have any more time to mess around trying this or that. The simplest step seems to have the attributions a line space below the image and leave the images the way they were formatted (as character) by the person whose company formats ebooks for a living.
Thank you very much for taking the time to extend help.
cheers,
s

A deadline is NEVER the right time to learn how to use any utility (be it an appliance, a vehicle or a computer application). It is not complicated per se. It requires an initial effort to get acquainted with new principles to be able to achieve “professional” formatting. There are two things to acquire: the available features and a rigorous method.
Considering the power of Writer, I’d say you need around one month with daily exercises to begin to appreciate what can be done and how.
From what I can see in the very short sample, I’m afraid that your formatting partner is not really “professional”. His lack of expertise probably costs him three-four times the time needed to layout the document with the tools I describe, aka styles. Note I don’t blame him. Word is not the adequate tool for this task.

This site (LibreOffice: Positioning images) explains clearly what happens when… and I found my answer:

  • turn wrap OFF
  • anchor to paragraph (though it seemed identical to as character, but I did take your advice there)
    Once I turned off the wrap, all the attributes lined up underneath all the pictures.

Now you don’t have to lambaste someone for using a format other than odt and asking a simple question - and it seems from the two steps above that it was indeed a simple question.

I am a senior citizen who is not tech savvy and never will be nor do I require the knowledge you are telling me I should learn.

The difference between To paragraph and As character is huge. With As character, your image becomes a “character” in the paragraph and its position results from the sequence of characters making up the paragraph. In other words, you have no freedom in positioning which results solely of this sequence. The good news is you never have overlap. The bad news is it causes rather weird things on line spacing.
To paragraph “attaches” the image to the paragraph but not inside it. The image will always be positioned on the same page as the paragraph. Various parameters are available to position it either in the vicinity of the paragraph, if possible within its height, or anywhere in the page. Since it can be sent anywhere, flag Allow overlap is necessary to force application of the parameters. If this flag ts not present, Writer is authorized to change the parameters to minimize overlap. The good news with To paragraph is that paragraph text will not interfere with the image (unless wrap is set to Through) and line spacing will never be changed by the image.

Using a non-native format is always an error because many primitives cannot be translated into the alien format. Writer does its best to interpolate with approximations but this doesn’t provide the exact representation and you’ll always have loss of information. And this is precisely the case with frames (images), all the more if you edit several times the document.

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