John:
I too found pictures and captions in Writer to be somewhat baffling at
first. Perhaps my two cents will help. I am not an OOO expert, and
some of my references may not use the precisely correct terms, but I've
learned how to work with pictures and captions.
After you insert a picture into a Writer document, the image has an
image frame with the usual corners and anchors. As soon as you right
click and add a caption, there is another frame in the mix and that's
the one that confuses things. The second frame is larger and includes
the original frame containing the image.
The first frame with the image, contains the submenu for caption, and
that submenu has the controls for the caption text and category. Here's
when you can select "None" for category and make the "Illustration:"
prefix go away. Writer defaults to something like "Image 1" for the
caption unless you specify other text.
If you insert a picture and resize it, OOO behaves pretty nicely and
allows you to drag the sizing handles or use the "Size and Position"
menu to do so. Once you've added a caption, resizing becomes a lot
more complicated, because you must make sure you have the proper frame
selected before resizing. If you don't, the image is likely to get
thoroughly distorted. In fact, it's just easier to size and resize the
image before setting a caption. I've found similar complexities with
moving the graphic after a caption is set. To move it, you must make
sure you're selecting the second (larger) frame. If you don't select
the second (larger) frame, you will be attempting to move the image
around inside that larger frame, a largely pointless and frustrating
activity. The easiest method I've found is to click below and left of
the caption (if it's at the bottom of the image) to select the larger
frame. This should make the anchor visible somewhere in your text.
You can then drag that anchor to the desired location.
The second frame, the one with the caption, is visible as the frame
anchored to the paragraph or character or whatever you chose as the
anchor. The first frame with the image, is within that frame. If you
want to edit the text of your caption, make sure neither frame is
selected. Then just click on the caption text as you would to normally
select text. That should put your cursor in the text of the caption
and allow you to edit the text.
I hope this helps. As I said, I don't consider myself an expert, but
these are just some of the techniques I've discovered to make working
with images and captions a little easier. Once you get the hang of it,
OOO Writer works pretty well with images; it does, however, have a
learning curve.
-Michael
On 8/16/09 [email protected] wrote:
Subject:
Re: [users] Editing picture captions
From:
John Kaufmann <[email protected]>
Date:
Sun, 16 Aug 2009 01:22:51 -0400
To:
[email protected]
In a message dated 2009.08.15 14:20 -0500, Brian Barker wrote:
Ah! Thanks! Then
"Illustration Number range Illustration: "
becomes, on instantiation,
"Illustration <Illustration number>: "
That's easy enough to understand. But what becomes of " range
Illustration"?
As I mentioned before, the whole of "Number range Illustration" is
the name of the field.
Sorry I did not pick up on that properly before. Of course every word
processor must keep fields to enumerate things like illustrations, but
I guess I'm so used to the user interface *not* showing the field name
(that is, simply showing the result for that particular entity in the
range) that I suffered a little cognitive dissonance at seeing the
field name (for the entity number) rather than the entity number -
probably mostly because I don't see any advantage to it, and it
violates a common programming principle of "information hiding" (to
simplify code maintenance). Now that I finally get your point, I will
keep that in mind. Thanks.
I still don't see how to do that - how to select the text to edit.
Providing you don't have the picture selected (or even have the
picture selected but not its caption), there's no problem, I think.
Click somewhere else so that you see no green handles. Then go to
the caption text.
Here we come to what has taken me so long to reply to your advice:
Where before I could not select just the picture (without the frame),
now I can *only* select the picture, and cannot see how to select the
frame. Of course that takes care of my initial problem: I can now
edit the caption. [And, BTW, with whatever changed, I now have
essentially the "Optimal Wrap" (figure to right; text wrapping to the
left of the figure) that I was seeking before - and I have no idea how
that changed either. (I say "essentially" in the last sentence because
the text spacing is not working, and because specifying non-zero
spacing has no effect on the text spacing, but splits the caption
between top and bottom - totally weird.)]
However, it's so frustrating that I cannot figure out how to reproduce
the behavior. I appreciate your help, but this seems just so buggy
that I may just have to give up (again) on OO. Where before any click
in the picture or caption selected a unified "frame", now I can no
longer see how to select that frame; only the picture or the caption.
Where before I put my questions regarding picture caption and text
wrap into two different threads (because I thought them unrelated),
now both seem to be fundamentally related to a question I asked in the
other thread (and which, in an otherwise excellent response, you
ignored):
... conceptually:
Within the text, one selects "Insert|Picture", not
"Insert|Frame". Does the application of a caption turn a picture
into a frame? If so, how can the picture be subsequently selected
apart from the frame?
Probably if I understood that conceptual context, the implementation
would seem, if not obvious, at least motivated (and I might be able to
reproduce "anomalous" behavior). But I don't have the conceptual
framework (if one exists) in mind, and again I'm not sure where to
find that background.
But, thank you for getting me this far,
John
