> 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
oops... I had quite a number of crashes trying to insert a caption and indeed it seems that I came across the bug you reported. Unfortunately I read your email after I reported issue 90641 so I have now added an hint to check if my issue is a duplicate. I have to say however that DEV300m17 does a decent job in recovering the document after the crash. > > 2. Problems exporting documents to Word format. I have no idea if this has > been fixed or not. Not sure, but I would agree with Jean that exporting to Word should be considered a secondary priority compared to making it easier to write and paginate the user guides. > > 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. I agree also on these two points: in general when I want to modify a figure, I end up deleting completely the old one and selecting a new one. For some reason when the picture is in a frame OOo does not amnage the frame size very dynamically. I also just experienced the problem of OOo ignoring the two colums layout when dimensioning a frame. > > 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... That would be great. My preference is to keep the frames notwithstanding all the defects mentioned above.
