I would like to know if it is possible to achieve a management of figure close to what Latex do, I mean, always considering the insertion point as reference:
If there is space, figure is moved to the top of the page text area
If there is no space on top, figure is moved to the bottom of the text area
If still there is no place, figure is moved to the following page
If still there is no place, figure gets its own page, as close as possible to the insertion point
I do not know if this procedure is relevant to the case, I already suffered a lot with images in the writer, so I started to insert a table (1x1, 1x2, 2x2 as needed) to keep the image in the place I put it. For my use it has improved.
This is commonly used workaround, e.g. in the LO manuals. However, it does not as versatile as the cases mentioned in the question.
Unfortunately, there is no such management. It is certainly a highly desirable feature the present manual positioning is not satisfactory.
From my experience, wrap mode is a key factor.
Wrap None is the safest mode. The frame becomes part of text flow and you roughly get what you describe, albeit it may leave an unused “hole” at the bottom of a page.
Wrap Through is intended for “watermarks”. Frame content is displayed “behind” text. I will not consider this case as not relevant for the question.
In all other modes, you have text “parallel” to the frame. It seems that only the paragraph is taken into account for text flow and the frame is unconditionally set aside the paragraph. If the paragraph is too high or too low in the page, the frame overflows the paragraph text area without constraint. I mean that paragraph text area is not the active limit, the page limits are. Consequently, not only the frame may cover footnotes, but also footer or header (depending on relative positionning to anchor) and even margins.
I found no automatic solution but manual tuning, which is not satisfactory because any editing may change the circumstances and compel to review the tuning.
Sure, management à la LATeX would be a good feature. You can fill in an enhancement request but I don’t think developers are available for that in short term.
Thank you for the answer
It seems you know this feature request
Bug 89477 - Images and objects should have an option “Anchor to page (moves with page)” to deal with page breaks
(I mean, check comment 5…), so as @ajlittoz said, this is not possible.
Mmmh, initial bug/feature request description is much less ambitious than LATeX functionality. I think these are two different things. Fixing the bug (or feature request) would solve “strange” behaviour of page-anchored frames (at least for non-informed users). I strongly support the suggested LATeX-like functionality but I’m aware I can’t expect it to be implemented soon.
tdf#89082