I have read many posts about this issue and have tried many things like setting the anchor and such. Nothing seems to help. I’m used to being able to do this easily in Publisher. I like LibreOffice very much but the problem with images is limiting. I have discovered some settings by double clicking on the image and the settings refer to space either from Top, Bottom, etc. and they seem to help reduce the space the image takes up but these settings seem quite arcane. Help?
Has anyone discovered a good tutorial on the image/cursor issue?
It can be easier to manage if you set images to anchor as character. It might not be suitable for all images but if you make it default then you won’t see images stacking up on top of each other if you insert a bunch at once.
Click Tools - Options - LibreOffice - Formatting Aids and set anchor to As character. OK
I’ve done that. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to help.
Writer and Publisher target different audiences.
Publisher is a DTP (desktop publishing program) and is page-oriented (you create “boxes” – text or images – inside these pages and you manually link them when they are related).
Writer manages a single text flow and pages are automatically added to host text. Text can be “decorated” with images which are anchored to some text element and move with it.
Since image insertions depart from text management (by creating no-text “holes” inside the page area), there is no easy handling for these “flow exceptions”.
The “correct”/professional way uses frame styles but the feature is very complex and difficult to master. Alternatively, newcomers resize and position the image with the mouse but this creates a very pernicious kind of direct formatting which in its turn causes a lot of problems, notably instability in layout.
The common workaround is to eliminate the “out-of-band” (“out-of-flow”) structural problem by turning the images into text (considering them as a huge glyph). Anchoring them As character, as suggested by @EarnestAl, is the way to do it. And it solves about 90% of problems.
Here, you probably stumble on the required change in workflow between a DTP program and a flow-oriented one. So, either your question is a very general one on how Writer handles images, or it addresses a specific problem you face. To best answer your question, more information is needed about the type of document you create. It can be a flyer, a catalogue made of independent “articles”, an academic paper with drawings clarifying some paragraphs, a novel with occasional illustrations, … Each type has its own solutions.
Thank you for this explanation. It helps me partly understand why I am having difficulty.
I’ve done a little better. I started a new file and went through the tools>options— first to set images As Characters. When I did this, things began to work better and the cursor was better controlled when I pasted the images in. In the file where I had been having difficulty, the images had been pasted in To Character as the default and even though I changed each one by right clicking to As Character, the cursor still seemed to have a mind of its own. Seems as though this could be improved.
I think I’m okay now. I need to spend a little time learning how to use the dialog box that comes up when I double click on the image where I should be able to modify protected space around it.
So I’ve clicked @EarnestAl as a solution but you @ajlittoz helped me understand it better. Many thanks.