Hi Joe,
In a message dated 2009.11.08 12:14 -0500, Joe Smith wrote:
... "Border" is not an independent entity from "Area"; on the
contrary, "Paragraph area" is bounded by the paragraph borders, and
"Page area" is bounded by the page borders. because the selection
set is not orthogonal, the model doesn't compute; it runs into
problems.
...
The 'border' here is not really a border in the sense most people
would get from seeing the word. Instead, here it refers to the space
between the paragraph margins and the page margins. So it is an area,
although in many cases it has zero width because the paragraph
margins extend out to the page margins. ...
Ahh! Thanks for that clarification!
... The menus may suggest that a caption is something you somehow
"add to" an image, but that is not the case. The image and the
caption (and the frame around them) are completely separate entities
at the document level.
That's true, in Writer's design. [I appreciate design generality as much
as anyone, but it can be carried to unproductive lengths. A caption is
an attribute of the picture it captions; without the picture, the
caption is meaningless. (That's why Writer adds the frame.) That said, I
recognize this is the place to talk about how OO works, not how it
should work.]
You can separate them by cut/paste and distribute them over the whole
document, if you like.
But if you cut the caption from a picture (frame) and paste it
elsewhere, does it retain the property of "caption" - or is it just
unassociated text?
Writer adds the frame and puts the components together because it is
a common way of laying out captioned objects. It's not the only way
to do it; it may not even be the best way. It may not fit your
document layout, but you are free to rearrange the components however
you like.
The spatial association of picture and caption is not just a common way
of laying out captioned objects. We are not talking about machine
semantics here. The caption, an attribute of the picture, is spatially
associated so that we can read the caption while studying the picture.
It is such an inherent and necessary association that Writer adds the
frame to enforce it. That spatial association is implicit in the word
"caption", and is the difference between a caption of a picture and more
general comments about the picture.
I believe (but I haven't checked) that you can make your own
fully-functional captions without using the Insert > Caption menu at
all.
Yes, as I understand it, that is essentially Andrew Pitonyak's method -
though it seems to me he does that primarily to compensate for Writer's
weakness in handling graphics.
Thanks again,
John
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
