How do I stretch an image in Writer?

[PaddyLandau]

I can find hundreds of answers to the question, “How do I resize an image without changing its aspect ratio?” That’s easy — just grab one of the green handles and resize. The aspect ratio is automatically maintained.

But, I do want to change the aspect ratio. I want to grab the bottom-centre green handle and stretch the image to make it taller. This will change the aspect ratio and distort it, but that’s what I want.

How do I do this? I can’t find an answer, nor can I figure it out.

LibreOffice version 6.4.5.2

EDIT: I’ve just discovered that the corner handles and the centre handles are inconsistent. The centre handles require Shift to change the aspect, whereas the corner handles don’t. It’s terribly confusing!

Thank you to @mikekaganski

I’m unsure how to mark this question as “solved”.

Thank you

[mikekaganski]

Every - [top/bottom/left/right]-center handles just do that automatically, without anything special needed. All corner handles do that when you hold Shift.

If you don’t get that behaviour, you need to provide specifics: which objects are those - images? OLE objects? shapes?.. maybe with screenshots, or better with sample document.

[Zizi64]

Always better to optimize the images with a third party image organizer/editor software before you insert them into a document.

[PaddyLandau]

@mikekaganski — Shift doesn’t work for me. I’ve tried it with both a simple JPEG and a simple PNG that I’ve inserted into a Writer document. The document was created from new, and contains nothing else bar writing and a table. Just one page. Let me know if you need more information. EDIT: I’ve just discovered that it works with Shift if you use a corner handle. The corner handles and the centre handles work opposite from each other. Talk about confusing! I’ll edit the question and close it. Thank you

[mikekaganski]

It’s perfectly sane and consistent. Dragging center handles, you explicitly change one dimension, and that indeed means you are changing aspect by default. Dragging corner handles, you explicitly change two dimensions simultaneously, and that is likely that you want to scale, not to deform. That as implemented in v.4.3, implementing tdf#71669.

And it seems that I said just that - all center handles do that without shift, all corner handles with …

[PaddyLandau]

@Zizi64 — That’s fine in theory, but every time there is an amendment in the document, it takes just a couple of seconds to resize the image in Writer. On the other hand, it takes several minutes to measure the required size, hop into GIMP or Photoshop or whatever, change the size, save it, delete the original image from the Writer document, insert the new one, change its attributes, and reposition it. If superfine quality were required for creating a huge poster, yes, but for the type of work that I do, it’s massive overkill.