Episode: 1445
Title: HPR1445: 22 - LibreOffice Writer Other Frame Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1445/hpr1445.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:03:32

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Whoo!
Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
And we're going to continue our Libra Office series.
And we've got a few more programs to do on Libra Office Writer before I then move on
to Libra Office Calc.
So let's get going shall we?
Now in the last episode, we looked at the frame style for text.
Confusingly, it's not called text, it's simply called frame.
But you know, that it is what it is.
Well, this is a very common use of frames.
You can use frames for any number of things.
It's a very powerful technique.
So we want to take a look at some of these others.
But to start with, let's get back to the basic concept of objects.
Libra Office is an object-oriented program.
And you should keep this in mind when dealing with this software.
A piece of text can be an object, and it can contain other objects.
Paragraphs, sentences, words, characters, or it can be contained within other objects.
Sections, chapters, document.
In the case we are looking at, a frame is an object.
In turn, it contains other objects.
And in turn, it is contained within larger objects, such as a page, a section, or a document.
Depending on the objects being contained, the frame styles can be different.
And that is what we need to look at now.
First, let's take a look at the formula frame style.
This style is for objects created using the formula application,
which in earlier versions of Libra Office was referred to as math, but that was a little bit confusing.
This application is not for doing calculations.
You would do that in Calc, but it is intended primarily for educators and academics
who want to create proper formulas to embed inside of documents.
So it's really just creating a visual appearance of how the formula should look.
It's not actually doing anything other than that.
So the subject of using formula will be explored later on, because that is, in fact, an application within Libra Office.
But for now, if you go to insert object formula,
it will open the formula editor, and you can create your formula.
When you click Save, the formula will be entered into your writer document,
with a formula frame automatically added to hold it.
If you check the frame properties for this frame, you will see that it is automatically sized to fit the formula.
If you double-click inside the frame, the formula editor will open again, and you can make changes, including the font size.
And when you save it, the frame will resize again to fit the object.
One thing to note is that by default, the formula frame is anchored as a character,
which means it is designed to be used in line in a sentence.
Because it automatically resizes all of the size settings are grayed out,
and other options in the style properties are like what we saw for the text frames.
Now, the next one we're going to look at is the graphics frame style.
As you might expect, this holds pictures. They could be photos.
They could be drawing objects created in the draw application.
You first have to have the picture or the drawing or whatever the graphic is.
But once you have it, you can insert it into writer.
And when you do a graphics frame is automatically created to hold the object.
Now, if you want to do a draw object, one of the things you can do is go to insert object,
OLE object, and that opens up a window of options.
And when you do this, this may trigger some thought, oh my goodness,
I could also embed a spreadsheet, a chart, a drawing, a presentation, or a formula.
I'm not going to leave it at that for now.
At some point, we may want to get into object linking and embedding,
which is what OLE stands for, and understand it some more.
But that's a very deep topic all in itself, and we've got to keep moving here.
So the next one is the label frame style.
Now, this is intended for use with sheets of labels.
And according to the Libra Office documentation is not really intended for users to work with.
Libra Office writer is set up to use these internally when you create a document for printing labels.
Essentially, if you've ever worked with sheet labels,
you know that the manufacturer has put a identifying part number on each type of sheet label that they do.
And most of those, you already have all of the definitions embedded into Libra Office writer to begin with,
so you can just select that and start printing.
That's all I'm going to say on that subject.
Next is the marginalia frame style.
This creates a frame next to the left margin, which can be used to add comments on the rest of the text.
It's also used commonly to create subheads in technical writing.
To do this, you need to have actually two frames, one marginalia frame for the subheads,
and one text frame called frame, remember, for the body.
Then there's OLE, which is, as we discussed a moment ago, object linking and embedding.
This takes an object from one source and embeds it in another object.
For example, you can create a chart in Libra Office Calc and embed it in a writer document.
But writer remembers what kind of object it is.
And if you double-click the object, it opens up the original application so that you can edit it.
Again, a false discussion of OLE is beyond the scope of this particular tutorial.
And last one is watermark.
As the name suggests, this style is replacing a watermark on the page.
This would be a background graphic, and it would default to being what's called a through wrap,
if you remember our discussion of wrapping options.
And that means that the text passes over the frame and anything that's in the frame.
Now, you should take care that the graphic still allows the text passing over it to be readable.
This can also be used to create a draft marking in the background.
One thing that you might want to consider is a possibility.
You can either create a work with this watermark style and create a variation on it
that has already got draft as part of it.
Save that as a style and put it in your default template.
Or you can create a template to use for drafts.
Whichever way you go, remember that any style that you're going to use over and over again
must be saved in a template.
So I would say creating a draft page style and saving it in a template is an excellent idea
so that you don't have to start from the beginning every time you need to do this.
So that, I think, concludes our discussion of the other kinds of frame styles.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding everyone to please support free software.
Thank you.
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