Change default template image anchor to as character

Found several posts on this topic, many of them old, none of them work.

https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?p=211302#p211361
Tick overwrite - where’s that?
Click from file - where’s that?

No reply

Also tried making a new template, inserting image, editing “frame/graphics” style, deleting image, save as template. Using this new template, add new image, which still came up with anchor as paragraph.
Using version 5.0.6.3 how do you make the default anchor type for new images “as character”?

Answer at OO forum
Essentially:

Save a template of how you want your document set up. For Windows, I put my template in

%AppData%\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\template

Open your template.odt file in 7-Zip.
Edit the styles.xml file and change the properties in the following tag:

<style:style style:name=“Graphics” style:family=“graphic”>

Change text:anchor-type=“paragraph” to text:anchor-type=“as-char”

I used HxD to modify the styles.xml file.

I did it (I use Mac OS Sierra). I have done all the things you said. So what to do next?

There’s no tag <style:style style:name=“Graphics” style:family=“graphic”> in my styles.xml. There’s no “anchor-type” keyword anywhere in the unpacked template as well. styles.xml has the tag <style:default-style style:family=“graphic”> instead. Setting “anchor-type” in it achieves nothing.

LibreOffice version: 6.0.3.2

These lines were in the OO default template. Apparently LO, at least modern versions, doesn’t have these lines in the default template. You need to add them, preferably to your own template file.

After extracting styles.xml from the template file, add the following lines to the styles.xml file in the office:styles section (around the 11th line):

<style:style style:name=“Graphics” style:family=“graphic”><style:graphic-properties text:anchor-type=“as-char” svg:x=“0in” svg:y=“0in” style:wrap=“none” style:vertical-pos=“top” style:vertical-rel=“baseline” style:horizontal-pos=“center” style:horizontal-rel=“paragraph”/></style:style>

To see a human readable version of styles.xml, you can open styles.xml in a web browser. Editing is best done in a hex editor like HxD as there are no carriage returns/line feeds in the file.
If you use HxD (Windows program), be sure to set HxD to INSERT mode (default is Overwrite).

Not possible, it seems:

Bug 32484 - Allow anchor settings in frame styles

Bug 36535 - EDITING: Updating of Frame Style not working correctly, anchoring to character do not updates

I remember someone “hacking” an odt file to manually modify the anchoring, but I’m not sure what needs to be changed.

The ‘hacking’ idea is mentioned here: Image AS CHARACTER as default

Presetting the anchorage - as of version 7.1

The anchoring for inserting images can be preset from LibreOffice version 7.1.

Select Tools>Options>LibreOffice Writer>Formatting Aids from the menu.

For Image/Anchor you can select: To Pragraph, To Character or As Character.

Wow… first bug is dated 2010, and in the work log there is a comment that the problem dates back to 2003.
With all the hits I see when searching for this problem, gotta wonder why developers can’t find the time to fix it in the past 6-13 years.

It’s 3 mouse clicks per image so unless you need it a lot just do it for each image.

1 left-click image

2 left-click Anchor

3 left-click Anchor as character

Well, it’s “only” 3 clicks… but just imagine this situation: I’m importing tens (hundreds) of single/scanned images into blank templates in order to print them as a PDF document…
Just multiply those 3 clicks by the number of images… It’s quite annoying, do you agree, don’t you?
Think an option to set the default anchor type would be welcome by many users.

Regards,
Max - Italy

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I add thousands of images for custom handwriting recreation. 3 clicks X 1000 = 3000 clicks.

Getting REALLY tired of this.

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Do what the dude qrktx said above, it works

You can use keyboard shortcuts Instead of the 3 clicks (just look for the underlined letters in the menus):


Alt+o for the “Format” menu

h for “Anchor”

h for “As Character”



I had the same problem but I figured out later that this Alt+o→h→h key combination is pretty fast and convenient…

So much fun that everyone tells the OP that his problem is not a problem - when it clearly is an annoying lack of a feature for anyone writing reports with a lot of images in them. When I was working as a sw engineer in the 90s we thought computers would remove dumb manual actions - but here there are people telling us it is fine to perform 3 operations per file every time, for 10s-100s of files…

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