Speculation on placing a figure on a specific page

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Bob S - 15 Jul 2004 19:04 GMT

How would the Word developers add a feature to place a figure on a
particular page? This feature would allow Word to be used for basic
page layout applications.

They would probably add another "story". Call it "Page-Locked Figures"
for example. This story would contain nothing but floating objects and
manual page breaks. The page break characters would not print; they
are simply an indication of where the page boundaries are. The user
would be responsible for making sure that he has the right number of
manual page breaks to get things on the page that he desires.

There would be a "View" for editing this layer. It would be somewhat
like Print Layout View without the document text or any floating
figures anchored to paragraphs. It would be nice to have an indication
of the header area, but this could be sacrificed if it were a problem.
In this view, the figures would show and the page break characters
would break the pages.

Section breaks (added by the user while in one of the usual views)
would be shown (view only) in this View. A section break added after
manual "pages" were already in place would simply be copied between
the existing section breaks, probably at the end of the existing
pages. It would be up to the user to add or remove manual page breaks
and move figures around to get them into the proper arrangement for
the new section.

The floating objects would have the usual positioning options except
for "relative to paragraph".

The page printing layout subroutine would add one step - lay down the
page-locked stuff for this page - between laying down the
header/footer and laying down the text. As it created each new page
(as required by the usual text layer stuff) it would look at the
corresponding page for Page-Locked Figures; if there were any on the
page, it would lay them down, then start on the text. If it runs out
of Page-Locked Figure pages before it has layed out all the pages in
the section, it would treat the remaining pages of the section as not
having such figures. If it had too many Page-Locked Figure pages for
the section, it would print them. (This would provide a way to have
figures after the text.) (If the extra PLF pages were blank there
could be a rule saying to ignore them.) When it came to a section
break, it would start looking at the next section of PLF's as well as
normal text.

Bob S

Reply to this Message

Jezebel - 15 Jul 2004 23:54 GMT

Nice thought, but conceptually at odds with the way Word is designed. What
you're up against is the basic difference between a word processor (like
Word) and a page layout program. What it amounts to is this: in Word the
starting point is the document as *content* -- ie the text of the
document -- and adds formatting and layout instructions to it. A page layout
program starts with the document as a *layout* -- ie the pages of the
document; then fills that layout with content. In Word the content is fixed
and the pages are variable; in a layout program the pages are fixed and the
content is variable.

Which is why the Word object model has no 'page' object. Pages exist in Word
only as an *outcome* of the pagination method; but ultimately they are
ephemeral, so attempts to position matter on specific pages are always
somewhat fraught.

> How would the Word developers add a feature to place a figure on a
> particular page? This feature would allow Word to be used for basic
[quoted text clipped - 41 lines]
>
> Bob S

Reply to this Message

Chad DeMeyer - 16 Jul 2004 00:13 GMT

Yeah, the only thing I can think of is that maybe a mechanism could be
provided which locks a paragraph or table a specific number of points from
the start of the document, sort of like an advance field but always relative
to the start of the document rather than a specific position in the content.
But since this goes against the grain of the object model, it would probably
be bug-ridden if even possible.

cjd

> Nice thought, but conceptually at odds with the way Word is designed. What
> you're up against is the basic difference between a word processor (like
[quoted text clipped - 56 lines]
> >
> > Bob S

Reply to this Message

Jay Freedman - 16 Jul 2004 02:49 GMT

Another problem that would get in the way is that you'd certainly want
to have captions associated with the page-locked figures, and then
you'd want cross-references in the main text to refer to those
captions, and maybe hyperlink to them. That makes my head hurt...

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word

>Yeah, the only thing I can think of is that maybe a mechanism could be
>provided which locks a paragraph or table a specific number of points from
[quoted text clipped - 69 lines]
>> >
>> > Bob S

Reply to this Message

Jezebel - 16 Jul 2004 03:25 GMT

It gets worse. You'd have to run a check whenever the document is
repaginated, to make sure that your locked items are still on the correct
pages. Sometimes they won't be, so you'd have to move them, which would
cause Word to repaginate...

> Another problem that would get in the way is that you'd certainly want
> to have captions associated with the page-locked figures, and then
[quoted text clipped - 79 lines]
> >> >
> >> > Bob S

Reply to this Message

Bob S - 16 Jul 2004 18:02 GMT

>Another problem that would get in the way is that you'd certainly want
>to have captions associated with the page-locked figures, and then
>you'd want cross-references in the main text to refer to those
>captions, and maybe hyperlink to them. That makes my head hurt...

What exactly is the problem? Whatever mechanism Word currently uses
for captions on floating figures ought to work. It already has a
mechanism to do the pagination, discover what page the figures ended
up on, and annotate that into the cross-references.

If anything it ought to be easier, since Word knows in advance exactly
what page the figure will be on. ;-)

Bob S

Reply to this Message

Jezebel - 16 Jul 2004 23:40 GMT

> >Another problem that would get in the way is that you'd certainly want
> >to have captions associated with the page-locked figures, and then
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> If anything it ought to be easier, since Word knows in advance exactly
> what page the figure will be on. ;-)

The problem is that Word does this referencing not to a page but to a
*location* in the document (ie a range, defined by start and end points as
offsets to the start of the document). For cross-referencing purposes, that
location is translated into a displayable value by going to that location
and finding the *effective* page number for that location. There is nothing
absolute about that value. Although in most documents the effective number
corresponds to an absolute number from 1 to n, it ain't necessarily so. Some
docs have preliminary matter (i, ii ...); some docs restart the page
numbering by sections.

For Word as it is, this doesn't matter because the whole collection of pages
is dynamic anyway and everything is designed around that. What you're
describing is trying to impose a static page model on top of the dynamic
one; it would be a shorcut to strabismus, insanity and death trying to
maintain the correlation between the two models. If you have a graphic that
'belongs on page 6' do you mean that it goes on the 6th page from start of
document or the page whose displayed number is '6' ? In a page layout
program, this concern is irrelevant because the pages exist in advance as
static objects, so you simply select the page you want and park your graphic
on it. In Word the pages are a moveable feast; a reference 'to page 6' has
no meaning until page 6 is actually produced, which doesn't happen until,
and changes every time, the document is repaginated.

Reply to this Message