Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Last week I said that we should not use OOo's default figures+
captions in a frame in the new user guides, because some of our active
members have encountered problems with conversions into other formats,
primarly MSWord.
I mentioned problems I'd had in converting to wiki format for the
purpose of putting the user guides on the website. I've now done some
testing and find that either I was mis-remembering or the conversion
process has changed. My tests show that in fact, converting figures+
captions in a frame to wiki format works much better (defined as: more
suitable to match the OOo wiki style) than converting figures and
captions in separate paragraphs.
Our primary (perhaps only) purpose with the template and instructions
for these guides is to produce an ODT file from which we can create
PDFs and wiki files, all with a minimum of effort. IMO it's entirely
irrelevant Whether the files can be cleanly and easily converted to
MSWord. (Other temmplates, produced for other purposes, may
legitimately have OOo-Word compatibility as a high priority, but I
can't see that our user guides files are in that category.)
Therefore I now strongly argue for keeping the OOo-default way of
handling figures and captions, that is the way we've been doing it for
the 2.x guides. I know that Michele agrees with this view.
Those of you who do want to separate the figures and captions into
separate paragraphs, please state your case. I've lost track of just
what the problems were, and how serious.
--Jean
To date, my primary problem with figures in frames has been:
1. Bug in OOo that can in some cases cause a document to crash OOo when
the page containing the figure is rendered. The bug has not yet been
fixed. I had to manually edit the XML from a long document after
isolating the section with the problem. I lost a few pages in the
process. Specifically, the problem was tracked to a layout loop for
"as-character anchored caption frame containing single-line
paragraph and at-paragraph anchored graphic, which is vertical
positioned center to the single-line paragraph." This is very similar to
the OOo Authors format. If anyone opts to perform a "vertical positioned
center", you will possibly lose the document.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=72077
2. Problems exporting documents to Word format. I have no idea if this
has been fixed or not.
3. Using the caption mechanism causes the figure size to use percentages
in at least one dimension, which sometimes causes issues when the image
is moved outside the frame.
4. I used the standard "insert caption" method and then I resized the
frame. To deal with this, I needed to install a manual break into the
frame. If I remember correctly, this may be new behavior in the 3.0 beta
as opposed to older version of OOo. It has been so long since I dealt
with figures inside of frames, that I do not remember the 2.x behavior.
Regardless of what you decide, I may be able to write some macros that
do things such as verify consistency. You know, what paragraph style was
used for the figure, how is the figure anchored, what is the spacing
around the figure, etc...
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
