I try to use shift then click the images but nothing works. What am I supposed to do?
In Draw you can select multiple images and group them, for example. You can copy the grouped object to Writer.
A curiosity (just noticed while testing):
For the pasted grouped object you can now ungroup it in Writer, for example. Afterwards, however, you can group the images again in exactly the same way.
Logo + LibreOffice.odg (19,7 KB)
Logo + LibreOffice.odt (19,7 KB)
With me:
Version: 7.3.2.2 (x64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 49f2b1bff42cfccbd8f788c8dc32c1c309559be0
CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19044; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: CL
This is because the images are “formatted/converted” as LibreOffice drawing format. Same phenomenon if an image is inserted as LibreOffice drawing format (from Draw) and then can be rotated steplessly as an entity.
In Writer: If an image/raster graphics is rotated steplessly you may notice some odd phenomenons relating to its frame.
To solve @joaogomes’s demands there should be a way to immediately convert any image to a LibreOffice drawing format by selecting it by shortcut CTRL+SHIFT. Then a grouping could happen. Could be an interesting feature request at bugzilla…
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You can’t.
An image inserted in Writer is not simply the image itself but has sophisticated ancillary data associated with it. While it is semantically relatively easy to deal with a single image, it is impossible to give a meaningful interpretation to what you want to do with the multiple selection.
Multiple images have several anchor points. When you copy, the images become “unanchored”, though the multiplicity remains. If you try to paste, what should become these anchor points? The same location? With the risk of masking some images through overlap? Fixing the issue would cost more user pain then handling each image individually.
To make things worse, your images may have different anchor modes (some anchored to page, paragraph or “as character”). Pasting them would then create a real mess because the anchor point is uncontrolled.
Add to that your question is incomplete because you don’t tell why you want to select multiple images. The only context in which there is a solution is the case where you select multiple images to give them the same attributes (position them identically, attribute them the same wrapping behaviour, …).
This can be done by designing your own frame style or customising a built-in frame style. You then assign this frame style to each image one after another.
If you never heard of frame styles, I recommend you read the Writer Guide for an introduction and practice a bit because mastering frame styles is not immediate. As always, don’t mix direct formatting with styling.
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Design PhD student with at least a semester of UX experience here: while your exposition on the reasons why LO Writer does not support this feature may make sense to, say, a developer, to the end-user of an apparently WYSIWYG text editor it’s pretty much worthless and feels like a cop-out.
All this talk about anchor points is all well and good but, from the moment that you allow users to select and drag (or nudge) a single object around, in an OS that allows you to do multiple selections pretty much everywhere (in the filesystem in general, on lists, etc.), you should allow them to select many objects, group them, whatever. That IS their legitimate expectation, further compounded by the fact that LO Writer’s main competitor has supported said utterly basic feature for, well… decades. Yes, it feels like this is a bug, sorry. And casually admitting that it’s a deliberate omission makes it all the more dumbfounding, IMHO.
Oh, it’s complicated to have the software figure out where they are anchored because of – checks notes – “sophisticated ancillary data” (by the way, if it’s ancillary, you don’t have to say it’s associated with something else, that’s a verbal redundancy; and while I understood perfectly what you meant by that, the whole thing made me chuckle… And while on that subject, couldn’t said data be preserved in some way and temporarily ignored on a case-by-case basis, like when you group two or more objects…?)? Well, tough luck, as that’s none of the end-users’ business, who just want it to “automagically” work like it does in Windows Explorer/the Finder/their e-mail client/their address book app/whatever. Even if the end result is a behaviour regarding text and image flow akin to that of MS Word, which motivated all those funny memes with Anakin and Padmé (you know the ones I’m talking about), it seems a sizeable number of users do want this feature (count me in, by the way).
Do you want your software to be desirable, or to achieve some sort of conceptual and functional purity? Can’t you keep all those advanced anchoring features and frame styles and whatnot for those users who really want and need them, and just let the “rest of us” be able to line up and group two images side by side in a single operation instead of forcing us to jump through hoops? Jeez, and the F/OSS community wonders why their software isn’t more popular…
There are several ways:
- Right click each image and select Anchor > To Paragraph. Drag one image to lie next to other image
- Right click each image and select Anchor > As Character. Cut and paste one to position next to the other image. This is how Word does it. If you want Writer to always anchor your images As Character then just change the setting in Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids and change the Anchor field to As Character
BTW this site is for users, if you want to make an enhancement request then please follow this page, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki
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Oh, yep, thank you for the heads-up. Interestingly, I already had a profile on there and created this one because… I guess I just ran into this post as being one of the most recent ones.
I’m fine with using Bugzilla, but it’s funny that the page you linked to does recommend this as an alternative to those you may finde the former “too daunting”. It should be, then, someone’s job to scour these pages and compile the most common issues, instead of it being exclusively a user-to-user platform, then.
By the way, your suggestion doesn’t help me in any way whatsoever. I still can’t click on them both (ctrl isn’t an option on the Mac, as ctrl+click activates the contextual menu by default, and the Select tool doesn’t work either), and changing their anchoring behaviour doesn’t change a thing when it comes to multiple selection. Is this feature finally available and I’m just missing something, or what?
The only workaround is… just selecting them individually and nudging them with the keyboard. By the way, I’m doing so outside of the main text area, because I’m just moving an ersatz masthead I did to make room for content. Yes, there’s probably a better way to do a masthead (maybe on the header section? Maybe as a master style thingy on the background? That’s how I’d do it in InDesign, and LO Writer does seem to have some nice substitutes for DTP concepts). No, I don’t care about it, as it’s a basic, single-page document.
Masthead has different meanings, Masthead (American publishing) - Wikipedia
If it is “a printed list, published in a fixed position in each edition” then a Frame Anchored to Page would seem to fit the bill. After inserting the frame you have to right click on it and select Properties. In the dialogue that opens select the tab Position and Size and then you can select To page.
Writer is a word processor but is not DTP software. Maybe Draw would work better for your current purpose? Scribus is an open source DTP application.
You are missing the point entirely, and not reading the room at all. I am a graphic designer with almost 20 years of professional or near-professional experience (let’s just say that my alma mater was rather demanding and realistic when it came to academic exercises, which included typesetting entire books and other publications, even at the BFA level) and currently – something you seemed to have missed entirely – a Design PhD student, i.e. I’ve been working with some form of graphical applications for 30 years now, starting with MS Paintbrush on Win. 3.1 (nay, actually it was DEC’s GEM Paint on the school’s computers the year before, in 1995), with CorelDRAW since I was around 14-15 (to do signage for, of all things, LEGO models) and later an updated version of the rolling stock diagrams for the Lisbon metro network (which is still being used to this day)… At the Uni, I switched to QuarkXPress and FreeHand, and later to Adobe CS. Of course I know which DTP apps are there on the market, including Scribus (at which I gave a look with the advent of the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription, as a tentative alternative to InDesign, and to which I gave a hard and likely irreversible pass, and that was incidentally when I also found about Serif and their now defunct Plus suite, and promptly sent them a letter-sized e-mail all but predicting the Affinity suite, of which I’ve ended up becoming a beta tester since its very inception and to this day). I know LO Draw, and I know Inkscape, and FontForge, FontLab, Glyphs.app and all sorts of specialised vector design software you wouldn’t even dream of.
My point being: there is an overlap of functionality on any app that may allow for typesetting of any kind and image embedding/linking. And each will feature its own methods to do things, and have an “ideal”, professional one, where the machine works for you, a prosumer one, a quick-and-dirty one, etc. And even the most die-hard professional may *still want to use the quick-and-dirty one ever so often.
Case in point: I’m writing my entire PhD thesis in LO Writer, the lack of proper CMYK support be darned (I will be printing only less than 10 copies of it, after all, and most readers will just download the PDF from our Uni’s repository, so having it in RGB colourspace isn’t a deal-breaker), and in that document I will likely cave in and embed LO Draw objects because the costs don’t outweigh the benefits (i.e. having all the niceties of InDesign/Quark/Affinity Publisher, such as page masters, baseline grids, character and paragraph styles, auto-index, auto-TOC and auto-cross-reference-linking – something which is completely broken in MS Word for Mac, for which I have a licence as part of my enrolment, which makes it second fiddle for academic papers where compatibility for collaboration and peer-review purposes is key –, plus the vital – and sadly unsupported on the strictly professional DTP space – Zotero plugin and its automatic bibliography generation tool…
All of that doesn’t mean that for a basic, two-page document with a calendar/planner for a class I don’t just want to be able to directly plonk down two logos (literally the one from the Uni and the one from the Faculty of Architecture, where I teach) onto the page instead, MacWrite-style (I’m almost betting that that 1984 piece of software handled objects better and more intuitively, but please don’t quote me on that), and be able to group them and nudge them without having to open LO Draw or some other vector drawing app of my choice. How hard is this use case to understand, consider and accept from an UX standpoint? It’s almost as of LO Draw is somehow sacred and duplicating some of its functionality is somehow anathema and a form of cannibalisation… It isn’t (or, at least, it shouldn’t be), as different users (and sometimes even the same users) will have different needs for different documents.
You still didn’t explain why, for what purpose, you want to select several pictures simultaneously. If it is a matter of assigning them the same “generic” properties, using frame styles will do. But, be warned, they are rather tricky to get right.
(By “generic”, I mean properties which can be applied to any, independent of the specific size or not giving them an absolute position.)
If you want automated positioning of images avoiding overlap, it is a bit more difficult because you must fine-tune interfering parameters in the style. I have done it for marginnotes (as opposed to footnotes), trying to position them as close to the anchor point as possible.
You’ll get help if you’re more specific on your goal instead of pleading competency by experience. Simultaneous selection may be a step in your procedure but a change of procedure may be desirable.
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