Images not displying

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beanobee
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Joined: Mon Nov 05, 2012 12:00 am

Images not displying

Post by beanobee »

Hi there
I have been using open office for a couple of months and was fairly happy with its versatility, until I started adding images to my document.
Now some of the images are not displaying, there seems to be an unusual amount of system crashes and the document is extremely slow when I scoll through it; and it has got even slower when saving.
The images are JPEG and until I started adding images, the program worked just fine.
Do I need to use another application like Presentation or Drawing?
Thanks for your help!
OpenOffice 3.4.1 on Windows 7
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acknak
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Re: Images not displying

Post by acknak »

OOo documents with many images can be troublesome. If you do everything just right, it will work fine, but if you just follow the obvious path, you're likely to have problems like you describe. Worse, OOo can hiccup and lose some or all of the images. You have to go back and insert them all over again.

The two main things I can think of are 1) don't embed the images in the document; use a link to the image file instead. Embedded images are great for small projects but when you need lots of images they can drastically slow down opening and saving and are at risk of being lost. Linked images avoid most of the problems, but you do have to manage all the files properly or the links can get broken.

And 2) stick to anchoring the images "as character". The default anchoring, "to paragraph", tries to flow the text around the images; it tends to tie up the computer and the document layout can become unstable as Writer tries to shift too many things around.

It can also help if you scale the images down to smaller sizes. The trade-off is that you lose some quality and you need other software to do it. Every situation is a little different and you have to be careful; there's no simple solution.
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k1ypp
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Re: Images not displying

Post by k1ypp »

I had already shrunk the images because it was for the Kindle version of the book and I didn't need the original size. In fact, they were dramatically smaller.

In my wife's case, linking is of no use, since she is posting the work, when finished, on Pinterest. Judging by your answer, I can only assume that this has never actually been solved? We'll have to see if bumping up the memory allocations, etc., has any affect. I wonder if anyone has suggestions as to what those numbers should be?

Thanks
OpenOffice 4.1.0 on Windows 7 and XP
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RoryOF
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Re: Images not displying

Post by RoryOF »

Bump the 256 to 512 (max allowed) I think you have to do this by the spin buttons. The other settings should be adjusted to adequately hold your illustrations. I think you may need to restart OpenOffice (including the Quickstarter) for these to be used, but am not certain. Easiest way is to power down.up your computer.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15 on Xubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
k1ypp
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Re: Images not displying

Post by k1ypp »

I'm not certain what you mean by "spin buttons?" If you mean the up/down arrows, to increment the settings, I upped it to 256 MB, it didn't allow anything higher. I tried typing in 512, but it only saved to 256 MB, which is considerably more than the default, which I think was 20 MB.

For the "Memory per Object" setting, I set it to the max, 5.0 per object, it wouldn't save anything larger.

I set the Cache for Inserted Objects, Number of Objects to 50, that was 20. Hopefully, whatever these things do, they will ease the pain a little.

OO is a really good product, and can be very frustrating when it acts like a MS product. Thanks to everyone for the support here.

I'll report back, regarding improvements, after it has had a while to prove itself.
OpenOffice 4.1.0 on Windows 7 and XP
beanobee
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Re: Images not displying

Post by beanobee »

acknak wrote:OOo documents with many images can be troublesome. If you do everything just right, it will work fine, but if you just follow the obvious path, you're likely to have problems like you describe. Worse, OOo can hiccup and lose some or all of the images. You have to go back and insert them all over again.

The two main things I can think of are 1) don't embed the images in the document; use a link to the image file instead. Embedded images are great for small projects but when you need lots of images they can drastically slow down opening and saving and are at risk of being lost. Linked images avoid most of the problems, but you do have to manage all the files properly or the links can get broken.

And 2) stick to anchoring the images "as character". The default anchoring, "to paragraph", tries to flow the text around the images; it tends to tie up the computer and the document layout can become unstable as Writer tries to shift too many things around.

It can also help if you scale the images down to smaller sizes. The trade-off is that you lose some quality and you need other software to do it. Every situation is a little different and you have to be careful; there's no simple solution.
Thanks acknak
I want to transfer the document into a PDF when I am finished; so will saving the images to a file work in this case?
There are a lot of images. I am creating an exercise manual with several or more pics for the exercises; and there will be writing included with the pics (to explain them).
Just wanted to check that I am using OOo in the correct manor, or should I look for another means in which to compile this manual.
Appreciate the help!
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acknak
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Re: Images not displying

Post by acknak »

k1ypp wrote:... In my wife's case, linking is of no use, since she is posting the work, when finished, on Pinterest. ...
Exporting as pdf, it won't matter: linked or embedded works the same. Posting anything other than pdf would be, um, surprising.

The problems is not fixed--and most likely won't be any time soon. You have to make good backups and always watch to make sure the images haven't disappeared.
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RoryOF
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Re: Images not displying

Post by RoryOF »

k1ypp wrote:I'm not certain what you mean by "spin buttons?" If you mean the up/down arrows, to increment the settings, I upped it to 256 MB, it didn't allow anything higher. I tried typing in 512, but it only saved to 256 MB, which is considerably more than the default, which I think was 20 MB.

For the "Memory per Object" setting, I set it to the max, 5.0 per object, it wouldn't save anything larger.

I set the Cache for Inserted Objects, Number of Objects to 50, that was 20. Hopefully, whatever these things do, they will ease the pain a little.
I had a memory of 512 in one OS version of OpenOffice, but I could easily be wrong in my recollection. Again, from memory, they used be "Spin buttons" in early Windows programming days. Another useful alteration on the same page is to reduce the number of Undo steps. I doubt that anyone can reliably remember 100 steps to undo; I usually set to 10. This should free internal resources of OpenOffice and might prevent crashes through these being consumed.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15 on Xubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
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