Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hello everyone.

I've read through many of the posts regarding images not displaying but instead just the box/frame where it would be. In addition, the frame I'm getting for many of them isn't the accurate size of the graphic, but basically just a placeholder for knowing that's where a picture is supposed to be.

What I'm doing is selecting/highlighting text & pictures on a webpage in a browser program, copying it to the clipboard, and then pasting that highlighted text and content into OpenOffice Writer using the option "Paste Special" & I've tried both, "HTML Format" & "HTML Format Without Comments". The only thing that doesn't show is the pictures. The checkbox in the View sub-menu of the Options menu for whether or not to display graphics & objects, is checked, in both branches for OpenOffice Writer & OpenOffice Writer/Web.


I remember reading a couple posts about changes in OpenOffice for how graphics are handled. I remember reading some posts about having to insert pictures one-by-one & making sure a checkbox is answered correctly for whether to insert the picture itself or just a link to it after it's already been saved on your hard drive. And several posts about the View sub-menu in the Tools/Options menu to make sure the checkbox is checked for displaying "graphics and objects." That checkbox is checked in the View sub-menu's of the Options dialog, for both OpenOffice Writer & OpenOffice Writer/Web.

I guess I just have one main question: is it going to work sometime in a future release, where doing a regular copy-&-paste will work to get text and pictures pasted into the Writer document? Or is going back to 3.3 or 3.4 the best option for the time being?

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

Copy/paste of images from a web page generally works as expected (or close to it) for me.

Can you give us the web address of the content that you're interested in?

Maybe there is some specific issue that can be addressed.

Hello Acknak, thank you for replying.

Here are some webpages from which the pictures don't paste. Sidebar areas of advertisements and such, I didn't care about and only paid attention to main articles/content. For a couple of them, I only highlighted the areas of text with pictures in the vicinity and I tell which specific text in a little note just underneath the webpage address. I sure hope these varied webpages will be helpful for getting this problem obliterated.

Thank You and have an awesome week, Kirby
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http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/08/26/paul-offit-threatens-religious-and-philosphical-vaccine-exemptions-a-respose-by-suzanne-humphries-md/

http://therefusers.com/refusers-newsroom/dr-paul-offit-is-admitted-to-philadelphia-hospital-after-taking-100000-vaccines-reuters-health/

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/health/vitamins-offit/index.html
I only highlighted & copied the main article

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/downloads
I highlighted from "Get the Latest Drivers..." until the bottom of the 5th column of the table, the column entitled "Home Appliances". Also, this table of 5 columns doesn't paste correctly but instead just ends up pasting each column going down the left margin of the Writer document.

http://e-sword.net/
I highlighted from the word "Features" until the last picture for "User Guide".
The pictures don't paste and only a frame/box shows where a picture would otherwise be. Also, these columns/table only paste in a straight-down fashion, one item at a time going down the left margin.

https://www.ashampoo.com/en/usd/pde/3606/system-software/Ashampoo-WinOptimizer-Free
I highlighted from the row that starts with "Overview Details etc etc" down a few paragraphs to where it says "One-Click Optimizer". No pictures pasted.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/01/18/history-vaccination.aspx
I highlighted from down a ways into the article where it says "The Story Behind The Smallpox Vaccine", down to "Oral Polio Vaccine Propagates Transmission..." a few paragraphs below the pictures. What pastes into the Writer document are just the frames/boxes denoting where the pictures would be (correctly centered as in the webpage), and they are much smaller than the size of the actual pictures.

The cnn page works ok for me--both images end up in the Writer document. The layout is changed--but that's to be expected.

The pasted samsung page does paste as text only, not images. I don't know of any way to inspect the html of a selection, so I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the page simply doesn't use plain images, or at least not in the part you indicated as selected. Some of the images on the page come from scripts, or from css styles, which are not supported by Writer.

If you need a particular image from a web page, copy/paste the image directly: right-click on the image in the browser, choose "copy image" and paste that into the Writer document.

Part of the information from the Samsumg page is JavaScript based, which makes it much more difficult to save as the format looks like text and pictures, but, in the html, does not show as text or pictures.

In Chrome, the html can be inspected bu right clicking in the relevant area, then selecting Inspect Element.

If I look at the vaccines page http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/ ... phries-md/ and highlight some text and an image, then go Edit > Copy in the browser; then Edit > Paste in Writer, both text and picture get pasted in as shown below.

Normally, I would expect the picture itself to be pasted in. In this case, (perhaps because the image is not in the same folder on the web page as the HTML text? or because of Javascript?) the picture is copied in as the link http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/wp-co ... images.jpg, and not as the image itself. Initially, just the box appears, and after a few seconds the picture appears.

A simple workaround is therefore to r-click the image in Writer and choose Copy. Now delete the image. Now Edit > Paste to put back the image itself, and not the link to the web based image.

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].

That sure makes sense for why pictures don't get pasted. In order to get past all the Javascript or CSS or whatever code that *results* in the picture, Writer (or any program) would have to have all that logic and comprehension written into the code for the pasting operation. So individual copy-and-paste of pictures or tables and such is how to do this, which is certainly doable when there isn't a large number of them. Wouldn't have thought code was being pasted instead of the resulting picture, definitely helpful to know.

These other two message replies with successful pastes, I'm at a loss for why. When I pasted the content from those webpage addresses I give in my initial message, zero pictures pasted, so that just tells me there's some kinda' oddball variation in what code is looked at or how, & when and how the copy operation is done and then how that affects the paste. Or something like that anyway, just some kind of variation. But thanks all the same to John_Ha & RusselB for the efforts.

From what I remember although it's been a while, 3.3 or 3.4 of OpenOffice worked like a charm no matter what the content was or its layout. Tables, columns, pictures, the indentation levels of comments after a news article, you name it, where one of the very few exceptions was sometimes having to copy-and-paste an article separate from the comments if you wanted the comments too, just something about the coding or layout or whatever that made it impossible to get an article's content at the same time as the comments. But these things are just what I remember though, and it's been a while. So I'm going to give 3.3 & 3.4 a go and see if I'm remembering correctly.

Thank you mucho mucho for the help, and have an awesome week, Kirby

Hraelyana wrote:These other two message replies with successful pastes, I'm at a loss for why.

I am using Firefox as my browser.

To debug further it would be useful to know what was actually on the clipboard. There are a number of clipboard utilities which show you exactly what is stored on the clipboard. Be careful however, as some clipboard utilities (keep a memory of copied stuff, view what is on the clipboard etc) interfere with AOO - the most common effect being a few seconds delay when you copy / paste, so only use it for testing.

Also, try copying with Windows started in Safe Mode with networking. This prevents all the startup programs running - it it now works, it was one of those interfering. Also try disabling all add-ons in your browser.

Try pasting into another application which supports text and images.

Hraelyana wrote:... From what I remember although it's been a while, 3.3 or 3.4 of OpenOffice worked like a charm no matter what the content was or its layout. ...

Web technology and the way web pages are built has changed a lot since those versions were current.