On Tue March 14 2006 21:18, Ed Nisley wrote:
> I hope it's just a matter of my not understanding how this
> is supposed to work, as my ignorance is -easy- to fix.
>
> The story so far: I'm laying out text & illustrations for a
> 7x9" technical book that'll weigh in at about 400 pages. I
> installed OOo 2.02, followed the User Guild recipe for
> master documents, built a bunch of dummy chapter
> subdocuments, worked out page & chapter numbering, dumped
> the text & images into one of the chapters, and started
> doing the layout to see if this will all work.
>
> Showstopper: a picture must not be anchored to a page in a
> subdocument, lest it disappear in the master document. The
> User Guide says (on page 328): "This is expected behavior;
> it is a limitation of the master document concept." Well,
> okay, maybe that was expected, but it sure looks like an
> "oops" to me. Why not just anchor them to the same relative
> page from the start of the chapter?
>
> I tried to anchor illustrations to the paragraphs that
> reference them, but several illustrations then cause
> pagination problems. There's not enough room on the page
> for both the paragraph -and- the illustration, so the
> illustration jumps to the next page, sucks its "anchoring"
> paragraph along, and leaves a huge blank hole on the
> previous page.
>
> The only solution seems to be anchoring the illustration to
> an unrelated paragraph that just happens to wind up on the
> correct page. This is a nontrivial process, because the
> pagination jumps around relentlessly as I drag the anchor
> to various likely spots to see what happens. Changing the
> illustration's position on the page also causes amusing
> twitchiness.
>
> Having found a more-or-less stable configuration, the master
> then document repaginates all the text and introduces the
> same problems all over again in different places.
> Sometimes, entirely blank pages (with headers & footers)
> appear as if by magic, with the offending illustration &
> anchor text falling on the next non-blank page.
>
> I have permuted the various Compatibility settings that
> affect wrapping, but cannot find -any- combination that
> works. Depending on the settings, text preceding the
> anchors ignores the illustration's wrapping mode or
> illustrations (seemingly randomly) jump to the next page.
> Or worse. To 2.0.2's credit, though, it hasn't crashed yet!
>
> Independent of all that, numbered equations -never- obey the
> illustration's wrap setting when it's anchored to a
> paragraph or character: the equations simply trundle behind
> the illustration without wrapping. When the offending
> illustration is page-anchored, the equation respects the
> wrap, but tends to offset itself vertically leaving huge
> holes (and, besides, no page anchors in a subdocument). I
> could manually adjust each equation's table width when it
> hits an illustration, but that would then change the master
> document pagination.
>
> 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?
>
> I laid out my previous (well, okay, only) book some years
> ago using Framemaker and, apart from a few quirks, It Just
> Worked. I had hoped that OOo master documents would suffice
> for book building, but the quirks (seem to, so far) vastly
> outnumber the benefits.
Ok, I do not know much about master docs, but .....
Are your sub documents all starting on a new page ?
Is the page formatting and paragraph formatting the same in your sub docs and
master docs ?
If both of the above are true then your sub doc should not really be
reformatted in the master doc but only renumbered, and therefore any
paragraph anchoring you have should still work. I think.
--
CPH : openoffice.org contributor
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