Arrange images in a column on the right side of the page

English
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#1

(Writer v7.6.4.1 on Windows 10)

I have three small JPG images that I want to arrange in a column on the right of the text paragraph in my Writer document.

I inserted the images from the Windows explorer by drag&drop, made sure that the images are in the original size and created a frame style called “image column right”.

Making the text float around the images on the left was easy enough to configure, but how do I make the images stick to the right of the page and have a fixed margin to the image above them in the column? It seems that I can only do that in the individual image properties (Horizontal position: Right of the complete paragraph), but not in the frame styling. And whenever I move the image with the mouse, the styling to the right of the paragraph gets overwritten.

Do I have to edit all images individually?

#2

This is a pernicious instance of direct formatting (DF). Images, frames in general, are much much more sensitive to DF than text. Any suspicion of DF on frames, be it done with mouse or keys, immediately masks (overrides) your frame style. And you get the behaviour you complain about.

You have to work absolutely strictly with frame styles.

Configuration of your Image Column Right frame style:

  • in Type
    • anchor To Paragraph
    • size: a reasonable minimum value like 1 cm with AutoSize both width and height
      or if you want only a fixed width, enter this width without AutoSize
    • position horizontal: Right to Entire page area
      This sends the frame to the right margin.
    • position vertical: Center to Entire paragraph area
    • tick Keep inside text boundaries to avoid overflow into top or bottom margin (implies possible page break before the anchoring paragraph)
  • in Wrap
    • wrap Before
    • options: tick First paragraph (so that image never covers any other paragraph), untick Allow overlap (to avoid interference with other images)
    • spacing:set Left, Top and Bottom to some distance to create the “margin” you request betwen the image and text
  • set Borders and Area to your liking

Insert your image by any convenient method inside the buddy paragraph. Apply Image Column Right. From now on, never never never touch again your image with the mouse. Any layout adjustment must be done through the style.

It is wise to crop and scale your image outside Writer with a dedicated program. Give Writer a ready-to-be-used image to avoid any problem.

To fix your present mess, review all your images:

  1. select an image
  2. apply Formula frame style
  3. aply Image Column Right

When this is done, all your images are now controlled by your frame style.

Of course, this works only if your document is .odt because DOCX has no notion of frame style and your images revert to direct formatting on subsequent sessions.

#3

Thanks once again! So as you can tell, I am trying to follow your advice and fix my document with proper styling. :slight_smile:

It’s obvious that I overwrite the styles if I move an image by mouse, but it seems to me that the initial direct formatting was created because I dragged & dropped the image into the document rather than inserting it via the menu…

I just deleted all images and inserted the first one from the menu while my cursor was in the “buddy paragraph”. What is a bit odd is that the image was stretched, even though the original image size is above my configured minimum size… I had to reset it to the original image size via the image properties, so hopefully that does not apply direct formatting again?

Also, the “Keep inside text boundaries” option does not seem to do anything, as the image is stuck to the very border of the page… I checked the “Standard” page styling which should be used on this page and the page borders are set to 2 cm each…

Edit: When I set the image frame styling to “Formula” and then to “Image Column Right” again, it is stretched again in the same way. The image properties are set to 71% horizontally and 51% vertically, that way it exactly matches the minimum width of 5 cm (original image width is 7 cm).

Can’t I set the frame styling to keep the original image size? I could just set a fixed width of 7 cm, but then if an image is 7,01 cm for some reason, it might do some expensive processing again…

#4

That’s one of the nasty things with image insertion. I have not determined the exact circumstances under which this happens. I think it is related to the fact that the image is “converted” to a frame. Sometimes checking AutoSize fixes the problem but then the frame may become larger/taller than your maximum.

This is the cure. And it does not count as direct formatting, hopefully.

This is because you have a mismatch between your image size and the target frame size. I recommend to scale, crop and adjust your image to the exact dimension before inserting or pasting it into Writer. My goal is to prevent Writer from trying anything to reach the frame size, i.e. have Writer use the image “as is”. In which case Reset to Original Size will restore 1:1 size and aspect ratio.

Correct image or frame handling is Writer is very tricky. You must be very meticulous. But the result is rewarding.

There is practically no risk horizontally. The frame is always constrained to the reference (paragraph text, full paragraph, page text or page). This is not the same vertically. Writer first considers the anchor then the origin defined by the position parameters. The image is laid out from this location. As already mentioned, horizontal contrained are automatically applied.

Vertically, the frame is still constrained inside the page, but the combination of anchor, reference and frame size may cause a part of the frame to overlay top/bottom margins or footnote area. In this case Keep inside text boundaries will shift the image vertically if possible (with a paragraph reference constraint), send the frame on next page if the anchoring paragraph occupies enough space or, as a last resort, flush both the anchoring paragraph and the image to next page.

If nothing happens in your document, your images were sufficiently far from bottom of page to need no further action. But keep the setting enabled, just in case.

#5

I am already doing that - I have scaled the images to the exact size that I want to insert them in in Writer. That’s why I asked if it is possible to set the frame styling to keep the original image size rather than use an exact size or minimum size. In the image properties, there is a button to set the size to the original size of the image, but in the frame style properties there is no such checkbox.

Thanks for the elaborate explanation, but I still don’t quite understand how to make the images in the column respect the bounds of the page… I would think that “text boundaries” also includes the horizontal margins.

#6

I am not a developer and can’t state the exact nature of the difference. I feel that frames are very generic containers. A priori, they allow for text to be set apart from the main flow. I feel that images are turned into a sub-category of frame (without text payload). Then the generic frame style has no Crop tab while you access these settings with a right-click and Properties on an image. Since there is no Crop on a frame style, you can’t lock original size. And this may also explain why “Reset to Original Size” does not count as direct formatting: the setting does not exist in the style, it not therefore an override.

This is more subtle than that.

For frames, you can choose among many references: paragraph text only, full paragraph (including indents and spacing), paragraph indent, page text, full page (curiously except top and bottom margins), side margins. Each reference has its own bounding rectangle.

If you still have problems, then there is probably a pernicious direct formatting. If you can’t sort out the issue, attach the (reduced) document to a comment or private message.

#7

I can position the image at the right position by setting it to the right of the paragraph text area. To the right of the page text area does not work, it will stick to the right edge of the page.

Paragraph would be sufficient if I just wanted the image column to be to the right of text paragraphs, but there are also some headlines. If I move the anchor of the frame to the headline, a large margin is introduced below the headline. Probably because if “right of paragraph text area” is selected, the image will only wrap around the paragraph where the anchor is located, whereas “right of page text area” would wrap around all paragraphs. That is, if it worked…

I will send the page to you.

#8

If you don’t mind the image interfering with subsequent paragraphs (as is usually fit in the case of headings), untick First paragraph.

#9

Ahh, that’s what that is for.

Then I can make it work now. I have to use “right of paragraph text area”, and whenever I clear the direct formating and apply the frame styling, I have to manually reset the image to its original size. But it works. Thanks!

EDIT: Except that multiple images aren’t positioned below each other in a column…

#10

Your frame style uses an incorrect reference: Right of page text area (for which a more understandable name would be “Right margin”) instead of Page text area. See my reply to your private message.


Stacking images below each other is another story. Describe as much as possible what you expect. Provide a sample file for experimenting. Interaction between frames involves the Allow overlap option.

#11

I see. It makes sense, as “right of” is already selected in the selection box on the left. Still a bit confusing. And it doesn’t make it easier for me that the English language package does not seem to be installed, so I have to guess the correct translation…

I am expecting something like this:

image
image899×495 246 KB

This was done by direct formatting. If I put both the anchors of both images in the first headline and check Allow overlap, the text wraps around them correctly, but the images don’t wrap around each other - they are positioned in a row:

image
image860×475 264 KB

#12

I am not sure you need the language pack. LO ships with a minimal en_US base configuration. You can enable it in Tools>Options, Languages & Locales>General. Select English (USA) for User interface. Restart.

Image stacking

Frame-frame interactions are not as developed in Writer as frame-text or text-text (the latter being simply text flow). Suppressed Allow overlap works first by shifting horizontally if there is enough room in the “reference area”, then shifting vertically if ti is not possible.


In your case there is ample room for two images horizontally.


But are both images pertaining “logically” to same paragraph? Do you really need two images on this paragraph?

If the answer is “no”, attach the images to different paragraphs (normally the one to be illustrated, which probably is not the heading).

Unfortunately, one last issue remains. Wrap spacing only governs text-frame interaction. It is ineffective on frame-frame which means you absolutely need to negate Allow overlap.

I found a dirty workaround to force frames to separate them visually. I add top & bottom borders to the frame style with line style None (this is a dirty trick) and top & bottom padding set 0.2cm (adjust to your needs).

#13

I already tried that, but the dropdown menu for User interface only has one option, German.

I moved the second image to the second headline and it caused a break between the two words in the headline. So I changed the styling for headline 2 to not allow any line breaks in between the paragraph, but that didn’t work. It was only when I applied remove direct formatting and reapplied the headline 2 styling that the image moved to the correct position.

So apparently there is lots of direct formatting even in places where you can’t see it. Maybe I should have started with a fresh document in the first place and just copied the text? Or apply remove direct formatting to the whole document?

What I don’t like about this workaround is that I probably can’t fine-tune the margin between the two images, because their vertical position not only depends on wrapping, but also the position of their anchor.

Isn’t it possible to create nested frames? Basically, the best way to define this kind of layout would be the way it is done in HTML and CSS, where the text paragraph only wraps around the column wrapper and within that column wrapper you can do whatever you want without risking an interferance with the text.

#14

No. Frames are truly independent from each other. Only Allow overlap controls their relationship (here, forced move to prevent overlap). A frame can only contain text which is jailed inside the frame. There is also the special case of image frame, IMHO created only to attach image handling to general frame management. You can’t lock a frame inside another one.

Laying out a heavily illustrated document is a very difficult task in Writer, mainly based on workarounds. As long as your images are not too close to each other, it is relatively easy.

You get an idea of the difficulties which stems when they become rather close.

If your layout direction is horizontal, then standard behaviour does the job. There is no obvious solution for vertical layout. I experimented a bit along the caption idea but it failed.

#15

That’s too bad… Are the developers planning on implementing it?

I guess more complex documents are still better handled in LaTeX. (Which I can’t be bothered to learn properly, either, though - for my thesis I have got along pretty well with Google and copy&paste…)

I feel like in this case, it is legitimate to use tables for formatting, even though it is a dirty hack. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that I learned a lot about Writer for the future, so thanks for your kind assistance. But I have already sunk a lot more time into this document layout than planned, so I will just go with whatever does the job now…

#16

Tables are a good workaround when everything else fails. It is the last resort before switching to desktop publishing programs (but be aware that DTP progs are page-oriented while Writer is flow oriented). Try nevertheless to keep number of tables to the minimum because they put stress on Writer. In the end, it depends on the size of your document: up to 100-150 pages, you’re on the safe side provided you fully style (no direct formatting).

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