Text Orientation

users
#1

I want to create a document of a layout of a bridge table. It should
have the words, "NORTH", "EAST", "SOUTH" and "WEST" on the four edges,
each facing outward.

That is, when printed and placed in the center of a bridge table, each
player will have one such word facing him.

How do I do that?

Thanks.

#2

One way to do this is to use a text box:
o Go to View | Toolbars > | Drawing, to display the Drawing toolbar at the foot of the window.
o Click the Text icon ("T") and drag a rectangular box in the document.
o Enter and style the required text.
o Click the text box to select it - so that it shows the coloured border and the eight coloured handles.
o Right-click the box and go to Position and Size... | Rotation | Rotation angle | Angle to set the orientation.
o Copy and paste the result to form the other necessary boxes. Note that the copies will appear on top of the originals, so you will not see the result of the Paste until you drag them to a new position.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
I have a feeling this is probably best done in Draw. I tend to use Writer
far too much for poster design and sometimes, later in the process, realise
that Draw would have been better. Sometimes it's worth copy&pasting
elements onto a fresh Draw document but mostly i just stay in Writer.

Writer is fine but Draw has a few extra features. It's just that i am not
so familiar with Draw and occasionally stumble around a bit. For example
when placing images i prefer the right-click menu in Writer as it's quite a
bit different in Draw because of the extra options.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

I know it's not part of LO, but Scribus is an excellent choice for this
sort of thing, and its also open source. It is a DTP package, not a
word processor, so you can't just start typing text, but it's not that
hard to get going. Just put text boxes anywhere where you want text,
and type into those. You can do lots of advanced things around exactly
how and where you want stuff to show up.

Paul

#5

You can make the text work for 90 and 270 degrees of rotation, but "upside down" needs 180. So it will be be very hard to do it in Writer.

The "drawing" of text option in Writer may have that ability, buy I rarely use that type of option.

#6

Hi :slight_smile:
Scribus is excellent.

It's part of the same eco-system as LibreOffice so it's not a million miles
off. Also i vaguely remember people saying that it could work with output
from LibreOffice. I'm not sure if you'd need to save in some funny
format. Hopefully ODF would be fine.

Personally i've only tried Scribus really briefly and struggled with it.
LibreOffice is as far into DeskTop Publishing as i ever really need to go
but Scribus really takes it up a few notches so it'd be worth my getting to
grips with it. I keep thinking about using it for the company newsletter i
have to do every quarter but am usually tooo rushed about then. Each time
i kick myself because i am sure it would save me quite a bit of time.
Moving it from Word to Writer (and paste-special people's articles as
"unformatted text") saved me tons of time.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#7

Er, no: I suggested a text box precisely because this can be rotated to any angle - including 180 degrees - very easily (as explained).

Brian Barker

#8

For some reason, I keep stating that the "text box" is not part of the "normal" text editing options.

Sorry about the confusion.

For me, from using other packages, before LO Writer, these "text box" options lean toward turning text into graphics and then inserting it into the text. So the "hard to do in Writer" was the standard text options and not the graphical text options.

Once you create the text box and place it into the document, do you have to leave the document for a "pop up" dialog to edit the graphical text instead of just clicking on the text and editing the character[s] that were wrong? If so, then it is outside the normal text editing process, so "outside" Writer's document "window". Yes, you are using an extension of add on package of Writer, or of Draw from Writer, etc., so I just got use to saying it is "outside" of the main package.

I stated this for Word and maybe OOo as well. I do not remember the last time I used the "text box" options inside Writer. Maybe it was in the early days of 3.x.x.

I tend to do graphical text in external packages like Inkscape and GIMP, then add the graphics in and anchor it where needed.