Andrew Douglas Pitonyak wrote:
I have a few complaints on how figures are embedded in OOo Authors
documentation. As a reminder, this is how I expect to do it [snip]
That is the procedure I use and recommend, for minimal problems
in the ODT docs themselves. I have only recently become aware of
some of the side-effects that are problems, so I am very glad you
have brought up this topic.
My complaints:
1. The figures do not export well to the MS Office DOC format. The
figures end up floating around. In other words, there is a bug in OOo.
We should probably submit an example document and request that this be
corrected in OOo.
Yes, definitely, it needs to be reported. I've never seen this
particular problem, but then I haven't exported to Word in a long
time.
2. There is a bug in OOo that sometimes barfs on exactly the wrong
combination. The document loads but if you attempt to view the page with
the image, OOo Locks. After receiving the changes, I had to unzip the
document, manually sift through the XML, find, and remove the frame with
the caption.
Yike! I have only seen this problem once, but it was on a file
that originated in Word (I don't know the Word version). I didn't
pay much attention, assuming it was a Word weirdness (which it
may well have been, in that particular case).
3. If the figure is narrow and the caption is long, the caption wraps.
That is easily fixed, as others have mentioned, though it is a
manual process.
I prefer the following, more time efficient, solution.
* Insert the image
* Anchor the image as character in its own paragraph.
* Set the paragraph to a specific paragraph style which is linked to the
caption paragraph style.
* Insert the figure field in the caption manually (Field <field + 1>:
text text text).
That is the technique I formerly used and I like it quite a lot
(also I wrote it up in the Writer Guide).
I have only recently discovered a nuisance (problem) when
exporting our docs to wiki format: the caption text gets lost
because the graphic + caption come across as a frame (with
nothing in it). The graphics need to be inserted manually on the
wiki in any case; but when the caption is in a separate
paragraph, it is exported rather than lost. I suspect a similar
problem (losing the caption) may occur when exporting to HTML,
but I haven't done this in a long time, so I must test it to be
sure.
So there may be a more general argument for changing the way of
inserting graphics in our docs, because we or others will
increasingly be converting them to (or from) other formats for
reuse in other situations.
The disadvantage is that the caption can not be left justified to the
figure unless the figure is left justified. It is, however, easy to
center justify both of them. So, you can center or left justify.
If we need to change our style, I would go for left-aligning both
figure and caption. That is the way I prefer to do it, but others
preferred having the images centred on the page, so we went for
centred. It's easy to change the OOoFigure style in the template
if we choose to do that.
What do others think?
--Jean
