I hope it's just a matter of my not understanding how this is supposed to work, as my ignorance is -easy- to fix.
The story so far: I'm laying out text & illustrations for a 7x9" technical book that'll weigh in at about 400 pages. I installed OOo 2.02, followed the User Guild recipe for master documents, built a bunch of dummy chapter subdocuments, worked out page & chapter numbering, dumped the text & images into one of the chapters, and started doing the layout to see if this will all work. Showstopper: a picture must not be anchored to a page in a subdocument, lest it disappear in the master document. The User Guide says (on page 328): "This is expected behavior; it is a limitation of the master document concept." Well, okay, maybe that was expected, but it sure looks like an "oops" to me. Why not just anchor them to the same relative page from the start of the chapter? I tried to anchor illustrations to the paragraphs that reference them, but several illustrations then cause pagination problems. There's not enough room on the page for both the paragraph -and- the illustration, so the illustration jumps to the next page, sucks its "anchoring" paragraph along, and leaves a huge blank hole on the previous page. The only solution seems to be anchoring the illustration to an unrelated paragraph that just happens to wind up on the correct page. This is a nontrivial process, because the pagination jumps around relentlessly as I drag the anchor to various likely spots to see what happens. Changing the illustration's position on the page also causes amusing twitchiness. Having found a more-or-less stable configuration, the master then document repaginates all the text and introduces the same problems all over again in different places. Sometimes, entirely blank pages (with headers & footers) appear as if by magic, with the offending illustration & anchor text falling on the next non-blank page. I have permuted the various Compatibility settings that affect wrapping, but cannot find -any- combination that works. Depending on the settings, text preceding the anchors ignores the illustration's wrapping mode or illustrations (seemingly randomly) jump to the next page. Or worse. To 2.0.2's credit, though, it hasn't crashed yet! Independent of all that, numbered equations -never- obey the illustration's wrap setting when it's anchored to a paragraph or character: the equations simply trundle behind the illustration without wrapping. When the offending illustration is page-anchored, the equation respects the wrap, but tends to offset itself vertically leaving huge holes (and, besides, no page anchors in a subdocument). I could manually adjust each equation's table width when it hits an illustration, but that would then change the master document pagination. Basically, there seems to be no way to do nontrival page layout in a subdocument that will also work in a master document. Am I missing something really obvious here? Or is this whole master document thing really as poorly thought out and badly implemented as it seems? I laid out my previous (well, okay, only) book some years ago using Framemaker and, apart from a few quirks, It Just Worked. I had hoped that OOo master documents would suffice for book building, but the quirks (seem to, so far) vastly outnumber the benefits. Looking further afield... Scribus seems intended for magazine-class layout, as it lacks any support for ToC/Index generation, cross-references, bibliographies, and suchlike. I'd rather do layout than (try to) build an index by hand... Tex and LaTex convert document composition into a programming project, but that may be the only way out of this mess. However, just because it worked for Knuth (may he live forever) doesn't mean poor little old me can dope it out... What do folks use to build technical books on Linux systems? I -really- don't want to build up a Windows box just to see if I can reinstall Framemaker! Thanks... -- Ed --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
