Caption a landscape image in a portrait document?

I’m recreating a book from 1919 in pdf (& later epub). I want it to be readable and potentially printable. The full page images in the original are rotated when they are landscape, but if I use rotated images in Writer I can’t get the caption to appear (logically) below the image (i.e. rotated at the right) instead of at the bottom of the page.

Is there any way to do this or do I need to include the caption in the image? I will need to do this for the epub anyway, but wanted to know if there was a right way of doing this.

I would recommend you to not rotate images of landscape pages into portrait orientation, but just use landscape pages in Writer for them, so that it would be easier for users to read.

However, if you must use rotation, you might consider the new feature in version 7.0 version 6.3: bottom-to-top direction of text in tables. So you could put your rotated image in cell A1 of your 1-row 2-column borderless table, and type the caption into B1, which is set to bottom-to-top text direction…

Yes, a table was my workaround for this, but since this is something you often see in printed books I just wondered if there was a standard way of doing it.

I’ve gone with landscape pages (created a page style for them), but wonder if this will complicate printing. I’ve set the doc up as A5 pages with the idea the resulting PDF it could be printed landscape on A4.

Notwithstanding @mikekaganski’s sound advice, you can do what you want at the cost of a tricky workaround. I don’t recommend it because it complicates the document structure and may cause instabilities. But you may have a try.

  1. Create a frame to reserve room for your image and caption: give it precise dimensions (larger than the image and caption) so that it “locks” the space. Take care of all the attributes like position and wrap property.

    Don’t anchor it To page. Use the usual To paragraph *mode, otherwise you’ll experience strange (for newbies) issues when you edit your book.

  2. Insert>Caption

  3. Inside this frame, insert your picture or another frame into which you’ll paste the picture and rotate the picture. Set the position and wrap properties of the picture (or frame) to lay it out inside the outer frame.

The net result is a “standard” portrait page with a landscape (rotated) image.

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Rotating images in Writer has only ever caused problems for me. Scaling seems to go wrong as well as caption positioning.

There is an open bug about it. My workaround is valid once the bug is fixed.