Ed Nisley wrote about his problems anchoring illustrations "to
page" (does not work in a master doc) or "to paragraph" (causing
pagination problems whether anchored to a related paragraph or
another one).
> Basically, there seems to be no way to do nontrival page
> layout in a subdocument that will also work in a master
> document.
>
> Am I missing something really obvious here? Or is this whole
> master document thing really as poorly thought out and
> badly implemented as it seems?
>
> [...]
> What do folks use to build technical books on Linux systems?
> I -really- don't want to build up a Windows box just to see
> if I can reinstall Framemaker!
Ed, I am a technical writer/editor/publisher, and my tool of
choice is OOo, despite its problems.
I used a master document to produce (among other books) the
OOo2.0 Writer Guide, which is over 400 pages long and contains
many illustrations. I have encountered plenty of examples of most
of the problems you mention, though it does sound like the page
layout you are attempting is rather more complex than what I have
done so far.
I don't think OOo is really designed or intended to be a
publishing program on the scale of FrameMaker; OOo is more
comparable to MS Word in that respect. OOo does a very good job
at what it does, including master documents, but it does have
limitations, and it sounds like you are really pushing its
limits. BTW, I discovered some interesting bugs last year when I
was pushing its limits putting together the Writer Guide, and
some of those bugs have not been fixed. That's quite apart from
"working as designed" not being what you or I might think the
program ought to do. But despite all its problems, I'm a big fan
of OOo for book publishing.
I have found that, whenever possible, anchoring illustrations "as
character" to an empty paragraph works best. (Of course, that
does not always suit one's requirements; read on.) The main
drawback is that when there is not enough room on a page for an
illustration, it goes to the next page and leaves a space on the
previous page. If you want to fill up that space, you must do it
manually by moving paragraphs from after the illustration to
before it.
The other drawback is that if your illustrations are smaller and
you want text to flow to the right or left (or both) of the
illustration, you cannot anchor the illo "as character"; you must
use one of the other anchoring choices. Your comments on wrapping
suggest that, in at least some cases in your document, you want
to do that kind of wrapping.
I have not, however, had the problem of the master document
repaginating and moving text and other things around from their
location in the subdocs. But that may be because almost all of my
illustrations are anchored "as character". I have seen the
problem you mention in other people's documents, where the illos
are anchored "to paragraph".
BTW, the biggest problem I have found with master documents is
several bugs related to the use of custom page and paragraph
styles (where the built-in styles work fine in the same
situations). If you haven't run into that problem yet, you've
been lucky!
I would be interested in seeing some examples of your files, if
you care to share them. I expect to be doing a lot more page
layout of technical books in the next year or two, and would like
to learn more about some of the traps I might encounter but
haven't already -- and possibly I can help find solutions to the
problems you are facing.
Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
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