Insert page and move images

[Begtech]

I write documents that have a great number of images and charts compared to the actual text. With default anchoring, these images tend to jump all over the place, and stack up on top of each other, and in general make a great mess (one of the reasons I moved from word was because the microsoft stuff was even worse at that time).

I have greatly improved the situation by anchoring the images to the page–no more mess and everything great, until I want to add some text and shift the images to a new page. As far as I can see, there is no way to insert a page and move everything after the insertion (including the images) down a page, which would give me manual control over my documents and not rely on buggy automatic reformatting which works very poorly for my documents.

I will spend some time learning about master documents an sections, but one should not have to spend hours to do a very simple thing like add a page to a document. Is there a simple way to do this, or should I make a feature request?

[Begtech]

Since I can anchor a chart or an image to a page, there must be some way that libreoffice knows what a page is. How hard would it be to program a little command that would move all my charts down a page? Could this be done with a macro?

[ajlittoz]

Does it mean that your charts are related to some paragraph (explanation, introductory text, comment, …)? In this case, your charts should be anchored to this paragraph. In principle, there should be only one chart associated to the “buddy” text.

[ajlittoz]

The flaw is your procedure is anchoring images to page. When you do so, your images are definitively linked to page n. Whatever you try to do, they will remain on page n.

I agree that anchoring several images to paragraph implies a lot of manual work to set them correctly (wrap mode and relative position).

I understand you try to layout some kind of catalog. There are probably two ways to address this goal.

• Anchor your images As Character so that normal text flow will handle them and flush them to next line as if they were really big characters. You gain flexibility but you lose exact positioning within the page

• Divide you page into cells (insert a table with enough rows and columns to cover the page). The cells can have well defined sizes so that your images are evenly spread. Each cell is rather independent from the others. You can then anchor one image per cell To Paragraph as usual without big trouble.

  The downside is difficulty to insert a new cell between two existing ones; your unit of work is the table. However, if some cells at the end are not used, redistributing images is not that hard nor long.

  Inserting a new page is very easy: just insert a new table between two existing.

  This is the solution I implemented for my collection of old photos: one reduced version plus caption (id) and a short description per cell.

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EDIT 2019-06-22

In case there is a single chart associated with a paragraph (this is the case when the paragraph introduces the chart, comments on it or summarises some interesting property), it is much better to anchor the chart to the paragraph so that text reflowing after editing moves the chart with its associated paragraph.

The overlap you mention may be caused by shorter paragraphs than charts, so that the chart in the first paragraph partially covers the chart of the next paragraph.

This can easily be solved: right-click on chart>Properties, go to Wrap tab, choose the desired wrap mode (likely to be Before or After) and check Options First paragraph. This will force the paragraph to be at least as high as the chart.

Also, you can save this setting (and others, such as relative position) in a frame style. This frame style can be used for all your charts needing the same anchoring properties. You can even restyle the existing charts.

[Begtech]

Thanks–will probably use tables and sections for now–what a lot of work and confusion for a simple “move all my charts and pictures down a page” Not marking it as an answer yet–hoping someone will come up with something easier!

[ajlittoz]

Remember that pages have no existence per se in Writer. They are not primary objects; paragraphs are. Paragraphs are formatted then sent to a page. When you anchor an object to a page, it is pinned to that page and disturbs text flow. Consider that page anchoring punches a whole in the “pages” making that area unavailable. Text then flows around these holes. So, this not a simple matter to “move all my charts and pictures down a page”, notably if it requires to create a new last page which does not exist yet.

[Begtech]

Perhaps part of my problem is the way I like to work–put in all the charts and then figure out what to say about them. Two charts pinned to the same paragraph work very poorly. Trying to figure out what to say about all the charts when the charts are in a bundle of different places is confusing to me.

[ajlittoz]

Can you attach a sample of your doc (1 or 2 pages) so that I can have an idea of your goal? I could then suggest another approach. Caution! files can only be attached to question, not comment.

[RGB-es]

Master documents will not help here, sections might, but that depends on several factors such as if the image takes the whole width of the text area or need to be surrounded by text, etc. But perhaps the best thing to do here is to change tool: Writer, being a “content oriented” tool, is great when you have lots of text and just a few objects, but if you have many objects and the probability of two of them overlapping is high, maybe it’s time to switch to a page oriented tool like Scribus.

[Begtech]

Thanks Downloaded and looked at Scribus. Seems to work well for images.

I should have said “a great number of charts”. I use many charts and actively edit and update them. This functionality is not available in Scribus.