https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161307
--- Comment #2 from Christopher R Lee <[email protected]> --- None of the solutions proposed by Stéphane Guillou for images seems ideal for all the numerous common uses of Writer – inevitably, because requirements are so varied. Writer is very often used as a starting point, hub, or the only tool, for work that may be intended for publication; we need to manage the risks of lossy compression as well as of losing an image file among hundreds of thousands of others. Drafts of books, reports, newsletters, websites, photo compilations etc. may be circulated among relatively inexperienced contributors, who may not know specialised software for images. Such users include volunteers with little office training who run voluntary associations. These are the people I propose to consider, though it would benefit everyone if the UI could inform on storage destination and above all alert to possible lossy compression. Extract image files from the ODF and OOXML files: Perhaps not well enough known. While unzipping is straightforward, a small application (which could be external) would help my inexperienced users with making backup copies. Big advantage: all image files, some of which might have been on a borrowed USB key or scattered around friends’ computers, are captured automatically. Limitations: the document file can get inconveniently big; to reduce the size, someone trying to help might then compress images without the author’s knowledge; documents often have more than one contributor and not everyone may be using Writer. I understand that MS Word will compress image files, for example when the declared physical size is too big for the page. Extract a single image: This could conveniently be done (not necessarily by the author) while re-reading a document – provided the images haven’t already been compressed. I hadn’t tried that (nor the copy-paste option), having assumed that these solutions would give degraded images, as they often do elsewhere. I didn’t find relevant information on the help pages, but here should be space in the right-button menu to add the word ‘lossless’; this is one menu that could benefit from the option of a bigger window with more words of explanation or, one day, AI-guided Help. Linked images: If the user first copies the images into a directory within the document’s directory, this should (I think) provide the same effect and degree of security as ‘Collect for Output’ of Scribus, but with a manual step in a slightly different workflow. While the original image filepaths are lost, the files are protected from unintentional compression. It’s too easy to forget to make the copy; perhaps thay could be automated, if we use (as imposed by Scribus) a fixed name and location for the image directory; I don’t know if an event-activated macro could do that. I’m in favour of linking at each image insertion, and not (Scribus) only when saving a session. Either way we may need a way of knowing which images have not been used in the final document. The main practical obstacle for the “ordinary” users of Writer I mentioned could be the need to circulate among contributors a directory instead of a single file; we don’t all yet use shared cloud storage. I presume the zip-file ODF structure can’t evolve in order to accommodate links. We would need to know about (in)compatibilities with other wordprocessors. Notes: - "URLs relative to file system" was already ticked in my implementation, but inexperienced users will need to know where and how to do a check each time a document is passed between computers. Writer can’t let you set options for a specific document. - Tick the "Link" box – the box is very small and hard to see in my implementation. With the link option ticked you can’t drag and drop an image you want to insert. - Also in my implementation, strangely in the ‘Rotation’ tab of right-button ‘Image properties’, you can ‘link’ (‘lien’ in French, likely a mistranslation) to the same or a different image file, but that just inserts the corresponding image and doesn’t seem to make a link. LO 7.6.41 (X86_64) French UI; Win 11 ‘family’ 23H2 -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
