HELP: Frame placement, wrapping, and collision

users
#1

Version: 4.1.2.3:build410m0

I have a document with many examples and illustrations. These are
typically in frames. I also place tables in frames.

But frames seem to 'flow' *very* poorly. They may often even end up
overlapping each other and then their placement must be manually
tweaked. This is very frustrating in a 500+ page document.

Frames seem to wrap with *only* the body text of the document and do
nothing to avoid colliding with each other.

Is there some option I am not setting or some style/technique to get
frames to try to fit naturally into the flow of the text. Anchor to
paragraph is my typical method; but it seems I really need an
anchor-to-paragraph-getting-as-close-as-you-can option without either
crashing into other frames or leaving a blank inch and a half on the
previous page.

#2

You may have some control if you change how your anchor your frames. For example, if you anchor as a character, but then you cannot move it around at will.

#3

"Adam Tauno Williams":

but it seems I really need an anchor-to-paragraph-getting-as-close-as-you-can option without either crashing into other frames or leaving a blank inch and a half on the previous page.

I'm afraid only DTP applications can ensure adequate placement of drawings. There's just no way to lay them out automatically so result would look nice.

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
True. Writer is better than Word for this but mainly when using the
native ODF format rather then the variable MS ones.

Draw is better than Writer.

With either you can use
Alt keyboard-arrows

to move images around with more finesse. i use the keyboard arrows to
get images fairly close to where i want (or drag them to roughly the
correct position with the mouse) and then use the keyboard arrows
while pressing the "Alt" key.

Also i generally prefer to "Anchor to page" although there are many
occasions when one of the other options is more suitable. Note that
MS Office doesn't have the "Anchor to page" as an option and i don't
think their format supports it.

Scribus has a reputation for being a bit too geeky but i think their
latest release has turned that around. LaTeX is still geeky but might
well be worth taking the time to learn. One of my colleagues was
getting great results with Scribus after just 10mins of fiddling.

Over this last week i have been trying out Inkscape for poster design.
So i didn't really need a DTP as such, except that my company's idea
of "poster" falls into the marketing idea of "tl;dr" and everyone else
translates into being a big yawn. Inkscape was great and had some
neat tricks for handling text. It allowed me to sort out kerning and
dynamically see the effects of increasing line-spacing, spacing
between letters, pushing super or sub-scripts up or down and all sorts
of good stuff.

I'm going to try Scribus soon though with a view to doing my company's
newsletter in it at the end of the month. I've been using Writer for
it for the past couple of years and people have commented about the
vast improvement in quality and the increase in speed of pulling it
together. With Word it used to take a couple of weeks and only
certain machines could handle it. On Writer it takes a day or even
less and even the slowest machines can handle it.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
True. Writer is better than Word for this but mainly when using the
native ODF format rather then the variable MS ones.

Draw is better than Writer.

With either you can use
Alt keyboard-arrows

to move images around with more finesse. i use the keyboard arrows to
get images fairly close to where i want (or drag them to roughly the
correct position with the mouse) and then use the keyboard arrows
while pressing the "Alt" key.

Also i generally prefer to "Anchor to page" although there are many
occasions when one of the other options is more suitable. Note that
MS Office doesn't have the "Anchor to page" as an option and i don't
think their format supports it.

Yes, it does, but it's not called "Anchoring". It's called Picture Position, and in Word 2007, it's in the Advanced Layout dialogue. I used it all the time in 2003.

Scribus has a reputation for being a bit too geeky but i think their
latest release has turned that around. LaTeX is still geeky but might
well be worth taking the time to learn. One of my colleagues was
getting great results with Scribus after just 10mins of fiddling.

If you want to try LaTeX, I suggest trying out the GUI interface for it, called LyX. I've got it installed, but haven't tried it yet.