[Solved] Illustration image spacing above & below varies

[EdIsenberg]

In my novel, I use small pictures as graphical indicators to delineate when there is a change in the point of view (POV). Here are two screen images of what I'm talking about. Please note that the after right-clicking the picture, you get to the following by clicking on PICTURE | WRAP:

This would appear to be evenly spaced between the paragraphs above and below.

This would clearly be an example of uneven spacing between the paragraphs above and below.

Note that the wrap spacing is exactly the same. If anyone wants, I can display the other two relevant submenus: TYPE and OPTIONS. There are no differences between the correctly and incorrectly spaced images.

Oddly enough, I can move the image up and down so long as I don't lock the position in the OPTIONS submenu. Of course, this requires a lot of back-and-forth experimentation, because moving it even a tiny bit too much in one direction can change which lines of text are before or after the picture. Given I have an awful lot of these pictures (perhaps 50 or so), manually moving each one would take not hours but days of work.

I though the point of spacing was to be able to precisely and consistently allocate how much white space there is above and below each picture, or paragraph for that matter. Obviously, this isn't working the way I expected. What am I doing or thinking wrong?

Ed

[robleyd]

How are your images anchored - and have you had a look at viewtopic.php?f=71&t=86682 ?

[keme]

The character baseline (or possibly "lowest descender") of the last text line in a paragraph constitutes the paragraph's lower limit, i.e. the lower edge of its "bounding box". In your first example, the last line of the preceding paragraph extends past the image position, so the image is closer to preceding text. The spacing from the paragraph's bounding box is the same in both examples.

One workaround would be to left align the image. I imagine that you don't want that. For a centered image I don't know of any efficient workaround. I'm looking into it now (in my idle time at work). I suspect that you have to do it manually for each image.

Edit: Scribus is a tool for typographer type tasks like this one. There is a learning curve, but it may be worthwhile if you have lots of viewpoint changes indicated by image. See this page. Writer also allows you to edit image "wrap contour" to some extent, but I cannot find a way to make the image take part in content reflowing. I don't know whether Scribus allows that either. You could ask their support...

[John_Ha]

As keme says, your gaps are the same when you measure them from the (not used on "one") descender of the last line of text.

See Chapter 8 - Working with Graphics in the OOo v3.3 Writer Manual for more information. When a pop-up window opens, click the Help button for extensive help on that function - it is often more comprehensive than the manual.

If this solves the problem, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[EdIsenberg]

Thanks to all. I believe Keme and ohn_Ha hit the nail on the head. The problem is the descenders forcing extra space down. This was made worse in the example because they eye played a trick on me. The picture not only is further below the last line (which ends in the word "one"), but because that word is way over to the far left, my mind saw the huge distance from the baseline of the line before that, and specifically the baseline (and not the descender line) of the words "was only the first step,"

While I appreciate the referral to Scribus, I had really hoped to avoid the extra overhead of working with a DTP program. I am not sure if I had to do it all over again whether I would use OOWriter, MSOffice, Scribus, or MSPublisher. I've used DTP software since it came with its own GUI interface so that it would work on pre-Win95 machines. It's great for newsletters but I've always thought it was overkill for a book, especially one which was basically just text.. It also requires a learning curve that I couldn't afford, since it was all I could do to get this novel out in this decade (I'm disabled, as is my wife). In any case, with my deadline to get it to the printer by the end of August, it's definitely too late now. Still, thanks for the suggestion!

I guess I'll just go through the novel proof and adjust just the ones that look bad.

Again, thanks to all. As always, I'll mark this as SOLVED.