Hi everyone,




First time poster, I'm working on a user manual and ran into an issue. Ive got a lot of text with images pasted in between using the square formatting option.


As I'm setting it up it looks fine, but thinking about future additions I realized that if more info is inserted it completely ruins the fine tuning I've made to the image locations.


So I was wondering if there was a way to set up invisible blocks that would conserve the formatting of the block. So that if something got inserted between block 1 and 2 the info contained in each one would move together and skip down to the next page if necessary instead of getting all jumbled up. I've tried searching for info and playing around with 1 column tables to no avail. Do any of you know anything that might be of use here?


Any replies are much appreciated.


Thanks,

I wonder if working in another program might be more suitable. I haven't used Publisher much, but if you have access to it within your Office suite, perhaps play around with that. Check to see if you have Publisher installed as part of your Office Suite (sometimes it is not installed by default but you actually can add it).

Maybe someone will have a better solution. Some ideas in the meantime:

-I don't like columns with word wrapping around images, but I think that is how folks tend to create books, newsletters, etc. in Word.
-Tables with invisible outer and inner borders might work, but that does not sound fun.
-You could insert rectangles of matching height (like invisible web-page css "divs") and give them no fill or border (but leave the border on until the end and then remove so that you can see them). You could then stretch them as needed to take up space. I'd say this is the least desirable of all, but if you like to visualize the page as divs, maybe it will work for you.

Unfortunately, there isn't a magic bullet here that solves all your problems but if you learn a bit more about pagination and how floating shapes behave you are better placed to understand what will happen as content gets added or removed.

Publisher will let you position a graphic and have text flow around it but you will find that adding a page of text in front of the graphic results in the associated text moving to the next page and leaving the graphic on a page not relevant to it. So I don't think moving to Publisher is necessarily the answer you were looking for.

Firstly, when you float (or wrap) a graphic, it positions itself on the page and links itself to a paragraph nearby which is now considered its 'anchor'. You should be able to see this anchor as a popup icon when you select the graphic (if your Word Options>Display> includes viewing Object Anchors). If that paragraph moves, the graphic will also move, according to the positioning rules assigned for its movement. If that paragraph is pushed onto a different page by preceding content - the graphic will also change pages to stay with that paragraph. You can look and edit these positioning rules by right clicking on the graphic and choosing Size and Position > Position.

So knowing the graphic positioning rules is the first part of the story, next you need to understand the paragraph pagination rules. Each paragraph has settings which govern how it behaves in terms of pagination. If you select a paragraph, and go to the Home Tab and click the dialog launcher in the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group, you will see the Paragraph Format dialog. On the Line and Page Breaks tab, you see 4 check boxes that control the pagination attributes of that paragraph. If you understand what each of those options do, you will understand how the document controls the pagination of those paragraphs.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Another thing you should know is that MVP Doug Robbins has discovered that floating graphics (rather than in-line-with-text) is at the heart of document XML problems. I can't tell you how prevalent this is, just that I try to minimize floating graphics, especially in important work.