Locking anchors for frames and graphics

[DanielDG]

Is there a way to lock anchors for frames and graphics? I face serious problems with their layout in the master document. Upon being reflowed in the master document, some images, despite the frames that contain them being anchored "To Character", i.e. having the right settings as all the other images, jump several pages and leave empty pages behind them, in most cases 5-6 empty pages.

[RoryOF]

One trick might be to place the anchor in a page header or footer. But the graphic etc won't now flow with the text.

[DanielDG]

How do I anchor a frame or graphic to the header? I tried dragging the anchor to the header, but it just wouldn't anchor to the header.

[RoryOF]

I'm not sure this will work. You click on the header/footer and /Insert /Picture /From file. The anchor now lives in the header, but you can pull picture anywhere on the page. However, because the anchor is in the header, the picture repeats to every page of that page style, so you'd have to have a proliferation of Page Styles, all the same layout but different names.

Perhaps someone else will have other ideas - I don't currently do any significant amount on picture insertion.

Are you still working on the monster file? Or is this a different file?

[John_Ha]

I haven't found a way to lock it, or even an easy way to decide where it should go. Image position is also dependent on the wrap settings. Anchor as character considers the image to be a character so if anchored to the a in " cat ", the image will always appear in-line at " c - a - image - t ". For best results I usually Anchor to a paragraph (to the first line of the paragraph) by clicking where I want the anchor, and then inserting the image, and then setting Wrap to Optimum page wrap. Deleting the location of the anchor, or the paragraph with the anchor deletes the image.

Images can often cause Writer "decision" problems across page boundaries where Writer gets into a loop bringing up some text to fill a gap on the previous page, which brings up the image anchor, which brings up the image, which spills the text with the anchor to the next page, which creates a gap on the previous page, which is where we started ...

I think it is sensible always to place the anchor at about the same vertical level on the page as where I want the top of the image to be. This minimises the "distance between anchor and image" and minimises spill problems.

Always allow Writer time to resolve problems like these and place the images and complete the layout or you will find images appearing in the wrong positions. Refreshing the sub-document with the image usually fixes it but you may need to help Writer by re-positioning the anchor to prevent this happening. Unfortunately any text added before the image anchor might cause the anchor in its new position to spill again. It may be helpful to place dummy empty pages during draft to "catch any spills" so that a spill on page 2 gets caught on blank page 10 instead of rippling all the way through to page 476, displacing hundreds more images in the process.

As always, leave "layout" work until the document is finished, proof read and final. Now fix the layout.