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#11
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Gripe about Word and image placement
"Jezebel" wrote:
Word does this already. RTFM, perhaps? Or do you just like griping? What manual, smart-mouth? Microsoft Help has been largely useless since Office 2000 and I haven't seen a manual since Office 97. I have seen no options on the graphic properties dialog to do what I've described, and I've looked with every new version of Word. Do you know how to do it, or are you just pretending to be brilliant? -- Harlan Messinger Remove the first dot from my e-mail address. Veuillez ôter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel. |
#12
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Gripe about Word and image placement
Well, that's answered my question, anyway. You do prefer griping.
"Harlan Messinger" wrote in message ... Cindy M -WordMVP- wrote: Hi Harlan, I've actually discussed this issue (and the related one about keeping a picture on a certain page), in person, with people on the Word team. It's not that they don't know there's a problem. Or even feel it would be nice to fix it. What's getting in the way is how Word was originally designed to work. (And WordPerfect was designed quite differently, just BTW) Word was conceived as a word processing application, primarily concerned with dynamic text flow. "Floating" graphics are foreign objects for the text flow, that the text flow has to deal with; this requires certain "compromises". For one thing, any object has to be attached to a paragraph, and when that paragraph moves to a new page, the graphic moves with it. Text also cannot flow past graphics that stretch across the entire width of the page. And the real obstacles come from when and how the layout triggers. Basically, trying to incorporate maximum graphics flexibility would mean that Word could end up never being able to finish laying out a page because the graphic positioning and reflowing of the text would go into a loop. No doubt there could be heuristics to figure out that such a situation has occurred and notify the user that the layout won't work as requested. Word's layouting capability has improved tremendously in the last decade, but it remains a word processing application. WordPerfect was a word processing application, and yet they made it work. Your explanation doesn't really get into why Word can't do the same thing. For more demanding layouting, you need to use an application designed to do just that. Publisher or PageMaker, just for example. Or, apparently, a competing pure word processing application named WordPerfect. I shouldn't have to resort to Publisher or PageMaker: I still only have one stream of text running from the beginning to the end of the document. And the computations really aren't that complicated. Word does figure out when it needs to put a graphic on the next page. There shouldn't then be any difficulty back-filling behind the graphic with the text that "follows" it. Let's put it this way: I'm a programmer, and *I* can easily work out the algorithm for this. -- Harlan Messinger Remove the first dot from my e-mail address. Veuillez ôter le premier point de mon adresse de courriel. |
#13
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Gripe about Word and image placement
Hi Jezebel,
I thought back hairs were illegal in Switzerland? You've lost me on this one... The Swiss occasionally consider themselves the hedgehog in the middle of Europe, so if not backhairs, then spines g Cindy Meister |
#14
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Gripe about Word and image placement
Hi Harlan,
WordPerfect was a word processing application, and yet they made it work. Your explanation doesn't really get into why Word can't do the same thing. WordPerfect is based on a very different concept: the formatting is stuck right into the text ("Reveal codes"). Word is more "object-based". Formatting, layout, etc. are based on tables of data, with pointers in the text to the information. In some respects, the one has advantages over the other; and in others, these are disadvantages. So, WordPerfect does the layout as it "reads" the file from front to back. Word doesn't do it that way. I'm a programmer, and *I* can easily work out the algorithm for this. Based on a "new empty framework", perhaps. But if you had to fit it into Word's core code, and not break anything else, I wonder just how far you'd get :-) If WordPerfect is more suited to your needs, then please, do use it. As a colleague of mine says "Horses for courses"; use the tool that will do the job. Cindy Meister INTER-Solutions, Switzerland http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003) http://www.word.mvps.org This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-) |
#15
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Gripe about Word and image placement
"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote in message news:VA.00009a6c.003d8dfe@speedy... Hi Harlan, WordPerfect was a word processing application, and yet they made it work. Your explanation doesn't really get into why Word can't do the same thing. WordPerfect is based on a very different concept: the formatting is stuck right into the text ("Reveal codes"). Word is more "object-based". Formatting, layout, etc. are based on tables of data, with pointers in the text to the information. In some respects, the one has advantages over the other; and in others, these are disadvantages. A linear scheme with embedded codes and a hierarchical scheme implemented with pointers are isomorphic. The correspondence between them is trivial. So, WordPerfect does the layout as it "reads" the file from front to back. Word doesn't do it that way. It reads the components of the page by tree navigation rather than linearly. It still follows a well-defined order from start to finish, and it still has to know for each component what formatting to apply. There really isn't a difference. I'm a programmer, and *I* can easily work out the algorithm for this. Based on a "new empty framework", perhaps. But if you had to fit it into Word's core code, and not break anything else, I wonder just how far you'd get :-) I would do just fine. I'm curious whether you're a programmer--the answer will determine whether I'm informing you or arguing with you. :-) If WordPerfect is more suited to your needs, then please, do use it. As a colleague of mine says "Horses for courses"; use the tool that will do the job. That's rather a simplistic solution, given that how an application places images is hardly the sole consideration in choosing it. I believe that Microsoft could perfectly well add this, that it's *obviously* a desirable feature whose lack indicates a certain slovenliness on their part, and my main intent was to express that sentiment. You could just as well tell me to use Mozilla or Opera if I complained that IE is still, after five years or so, deficient in some key support for Cascading Style Sheets, but that would simply be avoiding the question of why Microsoft hasn't seen fit to finish supporting CSS2. |
#16
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Gripe about Word and image placement
"Harlan Messinger" wrote in message ... "Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote in message news:VA.00009a6c.003d8dfe@speedy... Hi Harlan, WordPerfect was a word processing application, and yet they made it work. Your explanation doesn't really get into why Word can't do the same thing. WordPerfect is based on a very different concept: the formatting is stuck right into the text ("Reveal codes"). Word is more "object-based". Formatting, layout, etc. are based on tables of data, with pointers in the text to the information. In some respects, the one has advantages over the other; and in others, these are disadvantages. A linear scheme with embedded codes and a hierarchical scheme implemented with pointers are isomorphic. The correspondence between them is trivial. So, WordPerfect does the layout as it "reads" the file from front to back. Word doesn't do it that way. It reads the components of the page by tree navigation rather than linearly. It still follows a well-defined order from start to finish, and it still has to know for each component what formatting to apply. There really isn't a difference. Good and well known examples of what I'm talking about are HTML and XML. These are stored linearly in text files, corresponding to WordPerfect (where the WP codes correspond to HTML/XML tags), but they are generally parsed by applications into and processed as a hierarchy of objects with pointers. Your web browser does this every time it loads another web page. As for output, an XML data editor could just as easily serialize the whole data and pointer structure out to a file, Word style, as save it in linear HTML or XML format, WP style. The differences between the linear tag-delimited format and the hierarchical object format with pointers are immaterial to the ability of the application to process the data. |
#17
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Gripe about Word and image placement
I'm a programmer, and *I* can easily work out the algorithm for this. You flatter yourself. |
#18
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Gripe about Word and image placement
Hi Harlan,
Based on a "new empty framework", perhaps. But if you had to fit it into Word's core code, and not break anything else, I wonder just how far you'd get :-) I would do just fine. then I highly recommend you apply for a job at Microsoft and show them where they've gone wrong :-) Cindy Meister |
#19
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Gripe about Word and image placement
"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote in message news:VA.00009a8d.005e5b55@speedy... Hi Harlan, Based on a "new empty framework", perhaps. But if you had to fit it into Word's core code, and not break anything else, I wonder just how far you'd get :-) I would do just fine. then I highly recommend you apply for a job at Microsoft and show them where they've gone wrong :-) Even though I've asked, you've avoided given me any indication of whether 1. you're a programmer--that is, whether you have any direct ability to assess the merits of the reasoning you're giving me--or 2. you're a non-technical person who is either a. repeating uncritically something that someone at Microsoft once told you, or b. assuming that if Microsoft hasn't added this feature yet, it must be because it's not possible.. |
#20
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Gripe about Word and image placement
"Jezebel" wrote in message ... I'm a programmer, and *I* can easily work out the algorithm for this. You flatter yourself. You flatter yourself by imagining you have the psychic ability necessary to know whether someone who is a total stranger to you does or doesn't have a particular set of skills. Either that or you have a such a glorious opinion of Microsoft that you assume flat out that anything useful that they haven't already implemented isn't possible. What a delusion that would be. |
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