Can't get all of my images within an ODF to load in a master document

Lokee86 · September 15, 2023, 5:03am

As the title suggests, when I load my ODF file into a brand new master, which I’ve tried a few times, I’ve also updated, but when it loads into the master the only graphics that stay in place are the background image and the header at the start of the document. Everything else, including a text frame that doesn’t even have an image in it, just isn’t there. The invisible shapes blocking out where I’ve put images in the background, but no image itself.

Also, is it normal to not be able to load PDFs in a master? Or is that something that it should be doing?

RobertG · September 15, 2023, 5:59am

Which version of LO do you use?

Which anchor did you set for the images? No problems here with a master document and 12 subdocuments, containing hundreds of images. All images are anchored “As Character”.

PDF: PDF-files will be opened in Draw. All the content will be shown as separate pages. Text content shouldn’t flow from one page to another. Master document only will show Writer subdocuments…

Lokee86 · September 16, 2023, 5:14am

Base on the inquiry about anchors I played with them and discovered that was indeed the issue. Anchoring images to the page does not allow them to transfer to a Master Document, likely because page settings are within that document and not the sub-doc. It’s also worth noting that smaller graphics that don’t take up the whole width, or height of the page, didn’t stay in the correct place unless they were anchored to Paragraph. Anchoring As Character may also work as was suggested, unfortunately that option just wasn’t working for my application.

RobertG · September 16, 2023, 7:20am

If you anchor “To Page” and it is on page ‘1’ of the subdocument it will also be at page ‘1’ of the master document. Never use “To Page” together with master documents.

mikekaganski · September 16, 2023, 7:37am

No, and what @Lokee86 told is an important property of To Page anchoring. A code like this would show that:


sub ListObjects
  for each o in thisComponent.DrawPages(0)
    MsgBox o.name
  next o
end sub

I have just amended the FAQ.

ajlittoz · September 16, 2023, 7:52am

There is a huge misconception about To page anchor. Most users make a confusion between anchoring and positioning a frame. Frames are attached to some Writer “object” and always follow this object when text reflow moves the object. The anchor object defines inside which page the frame will appear. Then the frame can be positioned anywhere in this page (except, of course, when anchor mode is As character where the frame is considered a glyph by itself and is “integrated” into the text).

Leaving aside As character which creates a character, the properties are as follows:

To character: the frame is attached to the character and will appear in the page the character belongs to
To paragraph: the frame is attached to the left side of the first character in the paragraph
A special case of the previous mode, it makes a difference only when the paragraph straddles a page boundary
To page: the frame is not attached to text but the the “physical” page
The frame remains attached to this page whatever edit you make to text. This can lead to apparently a paradoxical situation (when erasing text) where your frame is preceded by undeletable blank pages because your text is now too short to cover pages up to the anchoring page.

As already mentioned, in any anchoring mode (except As character), the frame can be positioned anywhere in the page. Just alter the Position parameters in the dialog.
use

To page is very special and should be reserved for DTP-like documents where pages are meaningful.

In your case, the frame was anchored in some subdocument page. This page belongs in the subdocument only. When the master is flown, new pages are allocated in the master which obviously are not those of the sub-document. According to the rules above, the frame will not show.