hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1435.txt

Episode: 1435
Title: HPR1435: 21 - LibreOffice Writer Frame Properties Completed
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1435/hpr1435.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 02:16:29

---

DIVORN
Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio and another in our ongoing series
on the Libra Office writer. And we're continuing our page layout discussion now looking at
frames and frame styles. Now, last time we took a look at everything on the type tab. That
was a long episode because there's actually a whole lot to talk about there. But that was just the
first of a number of tabs in the frame properties window and we need to take a little bit of time to
look at the others. So we're going to wrap it up on the properties part in this one and then we're
going to continue for at least a couple maybe three more episodes. I don't know exactly how long
it's going to take because frames are such a big and important and powerful tool that people need
to understand how all of this works. So now, as before, I'm assuming now that you have inserted
a frame into a document or when you do that, the properties window opens. The first tab that we
looked at last time is the type tab. Now, let's take a look at the second one and this is the
Options tab. Now, the Options tab lets you do a few things. Okay, the first one is linking frames.
And what that does is that allows you can start typing text in a frame and then if that frame
runs out of space for some reason, you've given it a fixed size on the page, but you've linked it
to another frame, your text can just continue in that next frame and that next frame could be on a
different page altogether. So this is the kind of technique that if you've ever been reading a
newspaper or a magazine and you're reading a lot and it's like continued on page so and so.
This is a good way to do that in your document. So if you're doing say a community newsletter,
that might be something where you want to start the article on the first page,
but you don't want to take up the entire first page with it. So you have the first few paragraphs
on page one and then link that to a frame on page eight or something. Now, you can set that up on
the Options tab and one of the things you want to note is that to do this, you need to
give your frames names of some kind. Now, if you haven't done this yourself, Libra Office will
assign them in order frame one, frame two, frame three, frame four. It can very quickly get to the
point where you don't know which frame is which any longer. So I would suggest assign a meaningful name
of some kind to your frames if you're going to do this kind of linking so that you know that this
was the story about, you know, New Park opened and so you can do that story and then, you know,
frame frame one will be New Park one and frame two will be New Park two. It would be a lot easier
to keep track of all of that. Other things you can do here, you can protect this in various ways,
can the frame contents be printed, can they be edited, and you can even set the direction
of how text will flow, although, you know, that's a little chancey and I think has something to do
with language settings. But, you know, you can do some different language, a different directions
of the flow of text here. The second tab is called RAP. This is really important. When what we're
talking about here is that the frame sits somewhere on the page but around it, you have text
and that text is flowing in some sort of way. And that's really what we're concerned with here.
How do we go into flow that text around the frame and we have a number of options? So we're
going to do that. The other thing we're going to look at is the space between the frame and
the text that's flowing around it. Now again, as we saw last time, there is, you know, they put
in little graphics that kind of show you kind of how this is going to work. So for each of these
settings, there's a graphic that illustrates how the text is going to flow. So it's not too
hard to work this out. But I always encourage people, open up a test document, throw some random
text onto there and then start inserting frames and play around with it. That's really the best way.
So the first setting is none. I know what does that mean? It means there's nothing wrapping exactly.
If I have a frame in the middle of the paragraph, I will have several lines above the frame.
And then the rest of the paragraph will be below the frame, but nothing will be on the sides.
So the frame is in the horizontal space, all of its own. There's no other text there.
So that's one of your options. Now the next option says before. And what that means is that text will
flow down the left side. In other words, the text will come before the frame, but not the right side.
Now if you had a centered frame, that's kind of weird. But if your frame is positioned on the,
you know, more on the right side, that's probably going to look just about right.
The third selection is after. And this is just the opposite of before. So in this one,
the text flows down the right side of the frame, but not the left. Again, if your frame is positioned
to the left side, that's a reasonable setting for this. Parallel, your fourth setting,
and that means that text flows on both sides. So your line begins to the left of the frame,
and then it gets to where the frame is. It jumps over the frame and then continues on the right side.
This is a pretty common arrangement, particularly if you have a frame that's centered on the page.
And so that way that the text can flow around it.
And it's not bad. You have to decide what kind of page layout you're going for, but you can achieve
that with this. Then the fifth selection is through. It's kind of a weird one. The text
keeps going behind the frame, which means that any text covered by the frame cannot be read.
Kind of an odd effect. I can think of cases where that might make sense.
Where you have some text of say an announcement, and then you have a flash update just came in,
news just in, and you just slap that in a frame on top of it because it supersedes what was
there before or something. That's the best I can come up with. The last one is called optimal.
This is kind of light before and after combined in a weird way, where writer chooses which one.
And it's based on where the frame is located. So if the frame is slightly to the left of center,
the text will flow down the right side. If it's slightly to the right of center, the text will
flow down the left side. Now you want to have some fun, create a test paragraph, stick a frame in
the middle, select optimal. Now if you click on the frame so that the eight handles are visible,
you can use the arrow keys to move it left and right. And so just move it slightly to the right of
center, slightly to the left of center. And you can see the text jump back and forth. It's
amusing in some ways. They call it optimal. It doesn't strike me as optimal for page layout.
But it's there if you wish to use it. Now the other thing you can do here is you can set spacing.
And what they're talking about is the spacing between the border of the frame and the surrounding text.
Now this can be hard to see sometimes depending on what kind of text you have going around it.
For instance, on the left side, depending on how you have writer set up,
you might have irregular spacing because of where words happen to end.
Now you can go into writer and start doing stuff to make it line up better. But it's going to be
kind of hard to see. But if you try a test paragraph, select a parallel setting for the frame in
the middle of the paragraph. And then start changing the spacing for right. That's very easy to see.
And so you can see how it is, in fact, increasing or decreasing the amount of space between the
frame and the surrounding text. That's an important consideration when you're doing page layout.
You want to make sure things are sufficiently clear.
Now the next tab here is hyperlink. Pretty straightforward. You can set up your frame,
now obviously for a printed document that doesn't do anything. This is intended for people who are
reading it in electronic form. So you can set a link to a webpage. If anyone clicks on the frame,
they'll be taken to the specified webpage. That's very straightforward.
Borders. Frames generally have borders around them. And that's what defines the frame on the page.
So what kind of border? Well, you can go in here and you can say what type of line you want to use,
how thick is it? Is it a single or double or dotted? If you've ever done this for tables or
similar kinds of things, you know what I'm talking about. You have a lot of different options for
line type. You can decide do you want this to be on all four sides of the frame? Or you could just
set it to be only on the left and right or only on the top and bottom or whatever you want to do.
Or you can even have a frame that has no visible border. Now, when you're looking at it in
Libro office writer in the electronic version, you will still see a gray border for where the border
is. It just it'll suppress it when it's printed. Pretty standard kinds of stuff. You could
color the border if you wish. Again, it depends on what kind of printing you're going to do.
For me, with writer, I tend to think about print most of the time. So, you know, I wouldn't
pick color unless I was going to print in color and that kind of stuff. Now, one of the things you
can see at the bottom here, you can actually put a drop shadow on the frame. And that's the shadow
that is kind of underneath and slightly off the center of the frame. So it sticks out around two
sides. And so you can set that down there. It's an interesting effect. Try it out if you're
interested in that. Next tab is background. You can set a background color for your frame.
You know, that might be useful. You know, again, I'm thinking with printing, what I might do is go
for kind of a grayscale on that and just put a little little touch of gray to bring that out a
little bit. The default is is none, which probably makes sense. I would probably only do this with
text because if you have a picture inside of a frame and you try and put a background in this
you're not going to see anything anyway. So it doesn't really matter. The next thing is
next tab is for columns. A frame can be set up to divide into columns. And that can be an
interesting technique. I was taking a look. There's a fellow who has been doing some video tutorials
on Libra Office on YouTube and I was looking at one the other day where he basically divide
into two columns and in the first column was sort of a multiple choice question and the second
column was a picture. And so the multiple choice question was the picture on the right is a BCD
and he did that with columns. So you know, interesting use of the technique there.
The last one is macro. And this is where you can add programming.
I'm not really going to get into that because right now I'm really focusing on page layout and
this is a really an advanced topic. I do have a friend Andrew Pataniak who has in fact written
the book on writing macros and I think it was open office when he wrote it. Andrew does not
particularly care which version he's looking at as far as I can tell. So if we ever want to get
there at some point I'll get a copy of his book and hit him up for some tips
and then we can get into it but that's way down the road. So for the moment I'm going to wrap this
up. We have now looked at all of the properties. We still have more things to do here. So
this is a hookah for hacker public radio and I'm going to remind everyone as I always do. Please
remember to support free software. Bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community
podcast network that releases shows every weekday on day through Friday. Today's show,
like all our shows, was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever consider
recording a podcast then visit our website to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public
Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicum computer cloud. HPR is funded by
the binary revolution at binref.com. All binref projects are crowd- Exponsored by linear pages.
From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting needs.
Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons,
attribution, share a like, lead us our lives.