I am trying to create a document (a book) where every second page is a full page frame (to hold a photo). The frame forces a new paragraph to a new page. However if I make the frame a little shorter (less vertical) the text flows smoothly into the space above or below the frame. With a full page frame a new paragraph (hitting Enter) jumps to the following page, leaving lots of white space on the previous page. This seems to happen regardless of what Wrap option I choose for the frame.
Edit your question to explain what you do: there is no frame property to force a page break.
If the question is about location and size of the frame, this can be solved with a paragraph style for the anchor paragraph and a frame style.
if the question is about the waste of space due to the lack of “floating frames” or “page-associated frames” (by default of a better expression for frames constrained every other page), I’m afraid that Writer is not the right tool for this kind of book. An application like FOSS Scribus or commercial Quark XPress would be better fir for this task.
Don’t forget to mention your OS name and LO version.
I’m curious if you ever figured this out. I am trying to do the same thing, except it’s only one page here or there. I want to have a long run of text that fills page 1 and page 3. Page 2 should have a full page image. i want the text on page 1 and 3 to be connected so that if i remove a paragraph from page 1, the top content of page 3 would move up to page 1.
Incidentally, this works perfectly if i anchor the frame or image to the page, but then it doesn’t import when i embed it in my master document.
To page is a very special anchor mode akin to desktop publishing. It links irremediably the frame to a physical page number, say page 3. When you attach a sub-document to a master, page numbers for the bound sub-doc change in the assembled master. Your local page-3 is no longer page-3 in the master; the frame can’t be anchored. I didn’t experiment but have you looked at your master page-3?
What you want is a “floating” frame not logically connected to your text so that text flows around it no matter which edits you made. This means the frame has a varying anchor location with regard to text. Unfortunately this is not possible presently in Writer because all anchor modes (except To page) are related to a fixed position in text. Your workaround with To page is the right one but requires you to check manually the position, preferentially at end of job. And you can’t change the page once you created the frame (you can only delete it and recreate it).
To page works because pages are “external” to text. They don’t exist per se and thus have no “logical” relation to text.
Unfortunately this is not compatible with master+subs. Do you really need the master feature? Present computers allow you to manage “comfortably” documents up to 800-1000 pages (provided you fully styled them in order not to put stress on Writer with direct formatting).
That was the conclusion I was coming to. I am able to get so close but just not there with the other anchor modes. Thank you for the explanation. I made a sample document with the image anchored to page 1 and it didn’t show up in the master at all. I could technically merge everything into one document, but i was trying to avoid that just for the sake of maintainability.
Functionality takes precedence over ease of maintenance.
In my opinion, you should do without a master document and edit everything in one document.
Your specifications are simply not suitable for a master document.
But of course you are free to choose.