I’m using Mac OS Ventura on an intel MacPro 5,1 with OCLP to provide support for boot. I can also boot Ubuntu 22.04 on the same machine - haven’t tested that yet.
If I select several images from the MacOS Finder as drag them into a space on the Writer document, the first image pastes in the body of the document and the remaining image files are put in the document footer.
Is there some other way I can copy multiple images into a Writer document in one step and not get this behaviour?
I will try when running Ubuntu 22.04 and post its behaviour.
There are two important notions with images (or frames): anchor and position.
The anchor is the reference “element” to which the image is attached. If this reference moves (because of edits for example), the image will also move. The image is shown is the same page as the image.
Position (within the page) is independent from the anchor. The anchor may be at top of the page and the image sent at bottom. Of course, most of the time you want the position to be as close as possible to the anchor but this is not mandatory.
Now my question: when you say images 2+ are put in the document footer, are they anchored there (i.e. do they belong in the footer and are repeated on every page)? Or are they simply positioned there by some procedural artefact? Note that in the second case, they appear on a single page only.
In general, images are positioned a bit erratically after paste. A reliable way to have them in the “correct” place is to apply a frame style.
First, thank-you for your rapid, detailed and helpful response - especially the clarification of anchor and position.
LO version?
24.2.1.2 - as I wrote in the title of the post
Document save format?
Not relevant as the positioning problem of the multiple images ending in the footer occurs before the document has been saved in any particular file format.
Regarding the anchor - I have seen this before and when I right-click it I usually find changing this to “as character” gives me the control I want over the position of the image on the page.
Now my question: when you say images 2+ are put in the document footer, are they anchored there (i.e. do they belong in the footer and are repeated on every page)? Or are they simply positioned there by some procedural artefact? Note that in the second case, they appear on a single page only.
Sorry, I don’t follow you are asking. If I restate that might help. I click somewhere in the body of the document where I want to position the images. I have selected multiple images from a folder and I drag them to the position I want to position them in the document. The first image is positioned in the place in the body of the document. The remaining images are positioned in the footer of the document.
In general, images are positioned a bit erratically after paste. A reliable way to have them in the “correct” place is to apply a frame style .
Again, I don’t quite follow you. To what am I applying the frame style? If for example I insert a frame in my writer document - for example insert a floating frame and size it to the page - then the first image is positioned in the frame and the remaining are positioned in the footer, as before - but I don’t think this is what you are advising me to do when *applying a frame style *.
My need is relatively rare to drag and drop multiple images into a document, I think I will position them individually.
On the contrary, it is part of a stable solution. I agree that the positioning problem occurs before save but if you save other than .odt, there will be conversion and approximation to an alien format. On reloading, document structure will not be identical to the former internal one and new problems will pop up.
Anchor As character is usually the easiest mode to control a frame/image. In this mode, anchor and position are the same but your image is no longer a “side object”. It is now part of the text; it has become a huge glyph or character. And it has huge consequences on line height of the paragraph it is in. It has now a precise rank in paragraph text (say it is the fifth character) and this rank can’t be modified unless you change the text. You can’t position the image freely within the page (just like you can’t position freely any text in a page). The workaround is to insert empty paragraphs, tabs or spaces, which is bad (direct formatting always plays nasty tricks on your back). You have to account for the presence of this dummy text.
What is particularly difficult to understand with frames or images is the difference and independence between anchor and position. Except for As character (which is an escape from the general principle), anchor and position are independent from each other.
A click sets the anchor and nothing else.
The anchor defines the relationship between the illustration and text. Writer will maintain the anchor and the illustration in the same page (there is an exception, but let’s not enter into this subtlety for now). Edits in your text may cause the anchor to move (because the paragraph or character has moved). Then the illustration will follow its anchor.
Once the page of the anchor is known, position parameters are taken into account and the image can be sent anywhere in the page. Usually, you select a reference related to the paragraph (or character) so that the illustration remains in the vicinity of the anchor. The reference can be the paragraph with or without its indents and spacing, the margins, the page with or without margins. You then set an alignment within the reference (left, centre or right).
I personally very rarely use an absolute distance because it does not always cope well with layout changes in indents or margins = the illustration may slip unexpectedly into margins.
Once an image is present in your document, if you click it (select) and move it, you move the position, not the anchor.
Moving the anchor (to attach to another paragraph or character) is not obvious. You click on the image. Selection handles show up around the image but there is also a light-gray icon with an anchor in the text. Drag this anchor icon to move the anchor.
Be aware that any mouse action on an image or frame introduces direct formatting which is next to impossible to remove. This defeats all automatic repositioning behaviour by a frame style.
I avoid drag & drop with images because I experienced so many issues with it. The main problem here is I don’t know where the anchor ends up. Experimenting while answering, it looks like the anchor is located where you release the mouse button, hence it is To character. Initial position is determined by frame style Graphics.
According to my experiment, they will be anchored in the footer (not in your main text) and therefore become part of the footer and will be repeated on every page! Is this what you expect?
I am assuming here you have enabled the footer in the page style, e.g. to display a page number. If the footer is not enabled, there is no such area and your images will be anchored in the text.
An image is a frame by itself. Click it to select. Apply a frame style (double-click on a style name in the side style pane).
@ajlittoz Again, thank-you for the very detailed explanation you have provided. I will take time to study the purpose, behaviour and control of position and anchor so I can achieve the outcomes I need.
I have a basic document template with a header and footer with field values including file name and page numbering that suits my needs.
As in the attached video showing the behaviour of attempting to drag and drop multiple images simultaneously. For the record, this video shows some images begin pasted in the position I have selected in the main body of the document and some in the footer when a footer is present. I don’t want images in the footer (for now).
For my needs I sometimes need to take multiple screenshots in succession then dump them in a document and separate them by a few words of text to explain the step in using an application. The presentation of the material in the document does not have to be wonderful, but the ability to drag and drop many images in one step is much faster for my needs than copying each image separately.
I have a work-around for this “pasting into the footer” behaviour by temporarily deleting the footer as seen in the attached video (link below). Then after I have all the content arranged as I need, I reinstate the footer. This is an inconvenience but not as much as copying each image file one-by-one.
Also you can see at this stage in the process the document has not been saved so at this time there is no file format – which is why I wrote file format is irrelevant in this issue – unless I there is something I am missing here.
Quite difficult to understand what you are doing (no audio comment). If you’re dragging all images as a group, they should all be anchored to the same location when you release the mouse button. They may have different positions (re-read what I wrote about the difference between anchor and position) where some appear in the footer. However they are not anchored in the footer. Applying a frame style to all of them should fix the issue, but IMHO the may problem comes from the unique anchor for the group.
Though the video is rather blurred, I don’t think all the images (formulas apparently) should be anchored to the same spot. It is also difficult to make out what is text and what is formula. Or have you real text? It looks like you are inserting frames or text boxes, which is departing from flow-oriented documents and closing on page-oriented ones.
Can you send me through private mail a 1- or 2-page sample so that I have an idea of the final document?
This is not quite correct, because Writer is an ODT machine.
Writer internally is always ODT.
To save or open other file formats, filters must work to save to a foreign format or, conversely, convert from a foreign format to ODT when opening.
If you are dragging many images in from a folder, you might find having Anchor as character set as default, at least for that operation keeps the images under control. You can set anchor As Character as default by clicking Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids and under Image set it to As character.
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After you have placed the images throughout the text, you could apply a different anchor method or frame style
I have a work-around for this “pasting into the footer” behaviour by temporarily deleting the footer. Then after I have all the content arranged as I need, I reinstate the footer. This is an inconvenience but not as much as copying each image file one-by-one.
