On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Raphael Clifford wrote:Hi,
3) I now get no errors but the pictures are placed half way across the
page (from left to right) and the text wraps attractively to fit the
half page width that is left. I just want the picture centred, with the
caption below it and no text to the right or left or it. Is this possible?
Raphael,
If you place the cursor immediately to the left of the figure box you should be able to open the paragraph layout dialog and change the alignment to 'center'.
The captions, however, are placed according to length. In my book, most captions are quite short. They are centered on the page and do not extend the width of the image. When the caption length is greater than the page width, it is automatically wrapped from page margin to page margin. I presume that this is a design decision that prevents the caption from occupying excessive vertical space with wide horizontal margins. That would not look proper, would alter the perspectives of the entire page, and would resemble what one can produce using a word processor.
This caption algorithm may also be a function of the document class. I don't know if it would change if you change your document among article, report, book or whatever.
Just to offer an opinion, my perspective is to let the professional graphic artists, typographers and page designers make the decisions. I write and I could not care less about fine details of the page layout. Just this weekend I had a bit of this with a friend of mine who writes computer books (using winWord, but he used to use Framemaker). His comments on a review draft I e-mailed to him included: "I don't like the header format", "why don't you put a larger leading between paragraphs" and the like. Well, I told him I could not care less about such details, that Springer-Verlag has defined what they want in great and gory detail (sent him a copy of the formatting guide for monographs) and that one of the points of using a typesetting back end was to let it make these decisions for me. I think that word processing software leads to obsessiveness in minor details, often to the detriment of content. Not to imply this is true in your case, of course!
Rich
Thanks very much for the reply. The answer seems to be to use insert->floats->figure NOT insert->floats->floatflt->figure. I don't know what the latter does but it doesn't seem easy to use at all. The former works fine (once you get over the incomprehensible warnings mentioned before).
Cheers, Raphael
