Episode: 1425
Title: HPR1425: 20 - LibreOffice Writer Frames - Introduction and the Type Tab
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1425/hpr1425.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 02:08:04

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Amen.
Hello, this is Ahuka and welcome to Hacker Public Radio and part of our ongoing series
on Libra Office Writer.
We're looking at some page layout stuff and this time I want to start a discussion of
frames.
It's going to take us a number of episodes to get through because it's a complicated
but very powerful capability that Libra Office Writer gives you.
So what I want to do is introduce the topic and then we're going to get into sizing and
positioning.
And I have to warn you a little bit that a lot of this stuff is just not well documented
any place that I can find.
So I'm going to give you as much information as I can based on my own experimentation and
work with this stuff.
And I think that that will get you off to a good start but if you really want to get
very, very picky and detailed, this is an area that's going to be a little bit tricky
for all of that.
So we're looking at with frames is the third of the styles tabs but I'm not going to
get into the styles right away because with frames, the styles are not everything.
They're important but they're not the whole shooting match.
So what we want to do I think is start by taking a look at how frames work in general and
then circle back to styles and how that stuff.
Now what are frames?
Frames are containers.
They can hold text, graphics or other objects and let you control how they look on the
page.
A good example is say a newsletter layout that you might have pictures, graphical images
and text and you want all of that on a page and you want to control it fairly precisely.
You know, frames is what you want.
They let you flow text around the frame so you could have a picture and have the text
flow around the picture.
So it's very useful.
So a frame is itself an object, frames contain objects but remember the thing about objects
in general, every object has its own properties and so the properties of the frame are very
distinct from the properties of what is inside the frame.
The frame is the container.
It contains something and so that's the thing about object oriented technology here that
we need to keep in mind.
So if you put a picture inside of a frame, you're not going to edit the picture by going
into the frame properties.
What you have to do is open up the picture in a picture editing program and do something
like that.
So just bear in mind the distinctions there.
Now you can place a frame in your document in several ways.
The most general one is you go to the insert menu and in the insert menu you will see
frame as one of the options so you can insert something that way.
The more interesting case is if you insert something onto the page that requires a frame,
the frame automatically gets added.
So if you want to see how this works, I'm going to assume you have Libra Office Writer
open and that your styles and formatting window is docked on the left side as we've discussed
so many times.
And make sure you go and select the third icon which is frame styles.
And you'll see there are seven of these things that are listed there, formula, frame,
graphics, labels, marginalia, OLE, and watermark.
So you've got it open.
Now go back to your insert menu and insert a picture, doesn't matter what picture just
pick something from your hard drive, you've got to have a picture there somewhere and
put that into your document.
Now if you look to the left, you will see that the graphics item in the frames menu is now
highlighted and this shows you that Libra Office Writer has automatically placed the picture
within the appropriate frame which is the graphics frame.
Now pictures and graphics are only an example of what you can do with frames but to explore
this further let's start by getting into the properties.
Now when you insert a frame, you go to the insert menu select frame, the very first thing that
happens is that the properties window opens.
This is like a lot of the properties windows we've seen in Libra Office Writer, it's a
series of tabs, there's different settings you can make.
The first of these is the type tab which I think is kind of misleading.
What it really does is control size and positioning and it certainly seems to give you a fairly
high degree of precision here but the caveat is some of this stuff is inconsistent and it
is not at all well documented.
So I'm going to do the best I can with this.
So first of all size.
And start with let's note that on this tab there is a kind of a graphical view of a
typical page that's on the right and what you see there will change as you make selections.
So that's a good way of getting a handle on some of these things.
So pay attention to that and then you'll see how these selections are going to affect
things.
So the first group of settings says size.
You specify the size of the window here.
Of course you can also resize any of these frames by using your mouse.
If you're in the document you just click on and the way you do this you click around
the border of the frame and then you should see the eight handles, you know, the one on
each corner and one in the middle of each side.
This is standard for dealing with these kinds of objects.
So when you see the eight handles you can then drag any of them to resize the window.
That can be a little imprecise so if you do it here you can be more precise.
At least theoretically you can but if you'd rather just eyeball it you know use your mouse
and click and drag.
Now the width and height dimensions would be set in either inches or centimeters as the
case may be.
You know I'm in the United States so all of mine say inches.
If you're any civilized part of the world it would probably say centimeters.
The word only knows when the United States will get smart.
Now if you're setting your dimensions that way you're setting an absolute dimension.
So if you specify two centimeters then by golly it's going to be two centimeters.
It doesn't matter what's inside the frame if you do that.
So it's just it's set in stone.
Now the next alternative is relative dimensions and that sets it as percentage of the page.
Now if you're putting in a picture or something like that making the frame match up with
the picture makes sense absolute dimensions work fine.
That might also work nicely for a small text box but one of the things you can do with
frames is link them.
In such a way that you can start some text in a frame on page two and then at the bottom
continue it on page eight and have the rest of your text pick up there.
That's the kind of thing you see in newspapers and magazines and we'll show you where you
can set for that in the next tutorial but you know in this one I would just say for
stuff like that relative dimensions may work better.
And finally there's automatic and this is what allows the frame to expand as you type
in it.
Now if you don't if you're not careful about this you can you can have a frame in which
you have text or graphics or whatever but are only partially being seen because the
dimensions of the frame are too small to display everything.
So automatic which is I don't quite understand why it's automatic for width and auto size
for height.
There's probably some very subtle difference that has escaped me but if you do that you
will always have a frame that is large enough to display everything that's inside of it.
Now if you didn't do this and you find that a lot of your text is hidden you know just
go back and change the setting and your text will appear.
I mean LibreOffice is holding all of that data inside of itself inside of the document
so you can always change the setting and get all of that to appear again you never actually
lose it.
Now the last setting in this is the keep ratio check box and you know that way if you change
one dimension it will automatically change the other dimension in such a way as to you
know proportionally so as to keep the aspect ratio constant.
Now the next section that we're going to look at here is anchors and this is an important
concept and again you know this is one of those things where I'm going to tell you it's
just a little bit wonky in a few places.
Now an anchor says that my frame is going to be tied to some object and what object will
it be tied to and the first thing is a page.
Alright so if I tie it to page 3 I can position it somewhere on that page and no matter what
else I do I can change and edit text and all of the other things around the frame that
frame is not going to move.
Alright that's what anchoring to a page does.
So you know this would be very useful if you have a small text box or a graphic that you
want to have in a fixed place on the page.
You know if this was a newsletter you know maybe this would have you know you could put
that in at the very beginning that says some information you want to make sure everyone
sees and you always want it to be centered on the front page of your newsletter.
Now if you select this you're going to see any anchor thing that you select there's
going to be an anchor symbol which is kind of a gray thing that looks like a ship's anchor.
The anchor symbol will appear if you select page in the upper left corner of the page.
That doesn't mean that the frame will be in the upper left corner.
It just happens to be where they put the anchor symbol.
You control the positioning of it we'll talk about that in just a second below this setting
on the tab you can make positioning things.
Now the second anchor you can make is to paragraph.
So in this case what would happen is as you edit the text of your document that paragraph
may start moving maybe you've inserted some additional paragraphs before it and that
pushes it down the page or you deleted some stuff above it that moves it up the page.
Well as that paragraph moves in the document your frame will move with it.
So that can be useful if the paragraph is in some sense explaining like in a long article
you might put in a photo of something and then within the text you're referring to that
photo.
As you can see from this aerial photograph of blah blah blah and so you'd want to keep
that photo locked to that paragraph of text that is explaining it.
So anchoring it to the paragraph makes a lot of sense.
The third one says anchor to a character and this is one of those things.
If you take a look at the Libra office documentation it's very vague it says this is an awful
lot like linking to a paragraph and in my experimenting I'm having trouble seeing
a difference frankly.
I don't know if there is some subtle difference that I haven't stumbled across might be or
you know maybe it's something that they're planning to get back to at some point you know
I really don't know.
So I don't have a lot I can say about anchoring to a character but the final one anchor
as a character what this does is it treats your frame as if it was a character in the text.
So it's like an inline object and what that means is let's say you've got it as a character
within a paragraph and if you start editing the line that contains this particular frame
and you insert characters in front of it it's going to push the frame to the right or
if you go in delete characters in front of it it's going to move the frame to the left you
know just as if it was another character on that line of text.
It's kind of thing I would do for instance when I'm writing something like these tutorials
if I wanted to have a discussion about a button you know look for the paragraph mark it
looks like this and I could take that image and stick it right on that line where I'm
talking about it and treat it as a character in that line.
So that can be useful.
You can move or change these anchors at any point so you could take something that was anchored
to a page change your mind later and say no I think I want to anchor it to a paragraph.
If you double click on the frame so that you can see the anchor symbol you can click and
drag it or you can open up the properties window and change your selection if it's linked
to one paragraph and you want to move it to another you can just drag the anchor symbol
to a different paragraph so you've got a fair amount of flexibility there.
Now in terms of positioning as I said before the place where the anchor appears really does
not have a whole lot to do with it.
The one exception being if you're anchoring as a character then the anchor will appear
where that character is on the line but other than that what you need to do is you need
to specify how you want this anchored so the position if it's anchored to a page.
So that means it's in a specific position on this page and it will not change no matter
what else you do to the page.
You've got a few options so let's take a look at horizontal.
You start with a drop down that gives you four choices.
Left and that means your frame is going to go to the very left it's a flush left setting
in other words relative to whatever you choose in the second drop down and when I get to
the second drop down you'll understand what I mean but you know it's like are we flushing
left to the margin of the page or flushing left to the very edge of the piece of paper
or you know what is it exactly.
Now right is just the opposite positions your frame to the right again relative to the
second choice and the third one is center.
Now from left gives you the option of instead of flushing to one side or the other to specify
a certain amount of space how far from the left do you want this to be say I want it
to be one and a half inches from the left so you can specify it that way.
Now the second drop down is what finishes the horizontal positioning so you have four
choices here as well and this is another place where if you look at that display of a sample
kind of page just above this on the window you're going to see how this takes a look.
You can be placing your frame in what's called the left page border and this is the space
between the actual edge of the piece of paper and the margin you set for the text area.
So if you set a one inch margin on the left that first one inch down the left side of the
piece of paper is actually a place where you could place things like frames you can place
your frame within this one inch strip you could center it within that so that would be choosing
center for the first drop down and left page border for the second that would center it
within that one inch strip then there's also right page border right was just the opposite
side of the page and then there's entire page and that lets you set the position according
to the actual edge of the paper and it just basically ignores the margins altogether.
So you could say I want to set this two inches from the left edge of the page and so you
would choose from left on the first one and then set it for two inches and then choose
entire page for the second drop down and that would be two inches from the edge of the
piece of paper or you could put it in the page text area I want this to be flush left
but to the margin so in a case like this I would choose left for the first drop down
and then page text area for the second and it would be right up against the left margin
but if that margin is one inch from the edge of the piece of paper my frame will also be
one inch from the edge of the piece of paper.
So you know essentially if you think about it if you specified left for the first one
and then page text area that would get you exactly the same as if you selected from
left for the first drop down entire page for the second one and in the from left you
could set it to be one inch from the edge of the piece of paper it amounts to exactly
the same thing.
Now the other thing to mention in the horizontal settings is the option to check mirror
on even pages.
Now we just finish talking about page styles and if you remember what we did there we talked
about odd and even pages and how you mirror them.
Like if you were going to be binding a booklet or something you might want to make the inside
margin a little bigger than the outside margin to allow room for the binding to take place.
So you can set this here if you're putting in frames because maybe you don't know ahead
of time is this going to be an inside or an outside.
So it's only an option that makes sense if you've already on your page styles decided
that you're going to select that kind of mirroring.
Now that was the horizontal below this is the vertical section it's very similar.
The first drop down gives you four choices top, bottom, center and from the top you know
this really works pretty much the same way as the horizontal.
So it's flush to the top, flush to the bottom, center of the page or some distance from
the top.
But if you take a look at the second drop down it only has two choices.
Entire page or page text area.
You might say wait a minute why isn't there a top border area or a bottom border area.
When we did the horizontal there was a left border area and a right border area and most
pages have margins all the way around.
This is never explained in the documentation but I'm going to make an educated guess and
say that those top and bottom border areas are where headers and footers live.
And so if you want to place something there chances are they want you to use a header
or a footer to do that.
So you should use those options if you need to put anything in those areas.
Now all of that was positioning for something that was anchored to a page.
Now we went in the some depth about that.
I'm hoping that that will allow us to carry over some of these concepts to the others.
The next one is anchored to paragraph.
Now the essential difference here is adding choices to the second drop down that reflect
the possibility that your paragraph style may have shifted your paragraph relative to
the page margins.
What do I mean?
If you did a paragraph style and one of the built in ones that does this is the quotation
style and what does quotation do it indents everything a half inch from either margin.
So there's a half inch indent on the left and then a half inch indent on the right.
And it makes the paragraph stand out from the rest of the text that way which you want
to do with the quotation.
Well that means you've now got space there.
You've got that half inch on either side and that's what they call a left paragraph border
or right paragraph border.
That's the difference between where the paragraph actually stops and where the page margin is.
Okay, so that just means you've got a couple more places where you can start linking your
frame to in terms of the positioning.
Now similarly if you go to vertical you're going to find a couple of added options, you know
margin and paragraph text area are there and what do they mean by that.
This is where I'm seeing an inconsistency and I'm not sure why.
If you think back to paragraph styles that was many episodes back that we looked at this
but one of the things you can do with a paragraph style is say I want to specify some amount
of space before or some amount of space after my paragraph style.
So let's say I had put in some amount of space roughly equivalent to a blank line before
my paragraph.
So I've got this little little bit of space above the actual text area but it's still part
of the paragraph.
You can see that it's part of the paragraph by the way if you simply use the mouse to
select the text of the paragraph you'll see that the shaded area that shows the selection
extends all the way up there.
Well that's the difference between, you know if you go all the way up to include all of
that space you're going to the margin of the paragraph.
If you don't then you're simply looking at the paragraph text area.
So depending on if you anchored the frame to the top of the paragraph and selected paragraph
text area the frame would align to the top of the actual text.
If you selected margin it would align to the top of that added space before.
And all of that is actually pretty consistent with what it does with horizontal spacing.
But if you're in the vertical area and you select bottom I cannot find any difference
at all between whether you select margin or paragraph text area.
I don't know if it's a bug or just a misunderstanding on my part.
You know I'm trying to pursue this with some of the people in the Libra office project
and see if I can get a better understanding of this.
But that's what I know right now.
Now anchored to character, I'm having trouble seeing a difference in positioning no matter
how I do it.
Between the anchored to character and anchored to paragraph they seem to operate pretty
much the same way and this just may mean that my understanding is not sufficiently mature
yet.
And finally if it's anchored as character it doesn't make sense to talk about horizontal
positioning because where it is in the line depends on how many characters or before it.
So in fact they just gray out all of the horizontal stuff it's nothing.
There is a vertical positioning and it is probably a little trickier and I'm not really
an expert on typography.
So I'm just going to make a little bit of a stab.
There is something called a baseline and a baseline is that horizontal line on which the
majority of letters sit.
Now some of them like a letter P or a J or a Y extend down below that baseline at least
in western you know Latin letters that happens.
So if you select baseline the frame will align with the baseline and then it's the question
of is it top or bottom or what have you.
And frankly if it gets to the point where that's a big deal where you're going to put
this character type frame I think I would just click on it with the mouse and move it
to the right location I wanted.
So that is everything on sizing and positioning of frames in our next program.
We're going to take a look at all of the other properties that frames can have and what
we can do with them.
So this is a hookah and I'm going to as always remind everyone support free software.
Bye bye.
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