[me13013]

Howdy, Robert,

I wrote:
I have a Word document (a thesis for school), with about 20 figures
and tables among 80 pages. I would like the figures/'tables, with
their captions, to align to the bottom of the nearest page to where
they are referenced from (actually, I will gladly settle for aligning
to the bottom of *any* page; doesn't have to be the nearest).
Further, each of my captions includes a named bookmark which covers
the text of the figure number. I then insert a cross-refence to the
bookmark's text when I want to reference the figure from several
places in the document, and to the page of the bookmark's text to
create an entry in my table of figures.

and Robert M. Franz replied:
It's always good to mention the version of Word you're using ...

Oops, sorry. It is Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.3.5.

I'm not entirely sure why you're using a (custom?) bookmark at all,
since you can cross reference to captions automatically.

Several reasons. (1) I have figures, tables, chapters, sections,
equations, drawings, and a few other similarly numbered items, and it
seems easier to use one consistent means of tracking and naming
numbered items that to have to use something different for each one;
besides I think the ones that Word has built-in support for is limited
to the first four or five in my list. (2) When I started the document
I tried to figure out how to use the built-in methods for numbering
figures and it was quicker to figure out how to build the same
functionality myself. (3) I had a bad experience with an earlier
version of Word (late 1990s running under Win97 I think) in which it
would hose my table of contents 90% of the times that I tried to
update it. A coworker eventually figured out this was the result of
having change tracking enabled at the same time as the TOC update.
Given this past history for the product I have a strong feeling that
the fewer features I use, the greater chance I have that they will
work together.

I have found one method for aligning figure+caption but this method
deletes my bookmark. The method is as follows. (1) I select the
figure and text, (2) insert text box, and (3) edit the properties of
the text box so that it binds to the bottom of a page. This method
works great with one HUGE (and confounding) exception. The bookmark
that is inside the text box is gone. It no longer appears in any list
of bookmarks, and any cross references to it says something like
"reference to non-existent bookmark" (well, it says that once I update
fields, which I will need to do eventually, so this is an untenable
"solution").

In long documents, as a rule of thumb, you want your pictures as inline
objects. Spares you a lot of grief. Makes your documents a tad bit less
"sexy" (no text flowing around your objects), but still ...

If you do that (read: your picture is set to "inline with text", place
it in its own paragraph, and the caption below it),

Yep. That is what I have. My pictures currently are "inline with
text" (format pictulayout:inline with text). I couldn't see any
other way of keeping a picture with its caption.

then the manual way
of aligning the figures is by using paragraph formatting to the picture
paragraph: Spacing before x pt. Not much use per se, because instead of
a large gap at the bottom of the page, you get it above the figure ...

Well I tried something like that. But the idea of having all that
blank space is really unnacceptible for something that it supposed to
look like a professional document (it is my PhD thesis). So instead
of the blank space I attempted to split the paragraphs they way you
would see them split in a scientific journal that has pictures at the
bottom of a page.

The problem I had is this. Suppose I have a 20 line paragraph and my
figure+caption either has to go before it on page X, leaving 10 extra
lines on page X, or after it on Page X+1, putting several lines of
text in front of it on page X+1 and a buch of text after it on page X
+1. Things would look better if I split that long paragraph, so that
the figure+caption is at the bottom of the page. But I am using both-
sides justification and I can't find any way to convince word that the
bottom line on the first half of that paragraph (which Word now thinks
is two paragraphs) should be fully justified. Unless I manually
insert the right number of spaces between words, I iguess.

By the way, my pictures currently are "inline with text" (format
pictulayout:inline with text). I couldn't see any other way of
keeping a picture with its caption.

Also worht noting is that not all of my figures are pictures. Some of
them are, as far as Word is concerned, tables, with specific
formatting.

At present it seems my best option is essentially to align the text by
hand (the document is 'finished', in that I don't need to make any
more text changes to it). This is exceedingly tedious and then I also
have problems with getting Word to properly justify text in the
paragraphs that I have to split to stick the figures in the right
place. I am using left and right justify, and when I split a
paragraph I need the bottom line of the top half to justify right and
left, but I can't see any way to convince Word to do that either
(other than to manually insert a bunch of spaces).

Adding spaces - behold! :-)

If you really need floating objects (Shapes in Word lingo),

Thanks for the jargon tip. I'll look for "shapes" in word help and
see what it means. Maybe it will lead to something useful.

then there's no way around it: you paginate the document once only (in the end).

Hmmm. I find that hard to believe. Especially since both "text
boxes" and "frames" allow me to bind a pictures+text combo (and other
things) to top or bottom of a page (and to other positions). The
problem I'm having is that bookmarks and text boxes have an
adversarial relationship to each other.

How wide are your figures? As wide as the normal paragraph width? I
couldn't see how they would affect justification then (because you would
not get thinner paragraphs).

Full paragraph width.

Since my first message I have found a way to ALMOST do this. Here's
what I have learned by experimentation.

(1) Creating a text box (by selecting my picture+caption and doing
insert:text box) trashes any bookmarks inside it. However, I can
recreate the bookmarks after I create the text box. Annoying but
workable.

(2) However, outside of the text box Word still somewhat pretends
those bookmarks don't exist. If you try to GOTO such a bookmark it
says it can't find it. But if you have a cross reference to it, the
cross reference finds it. So far so good. But...

(3) The cross reference gets the wrong page number. Instead of e.g.
page 6 which is where the text box was, the cross reference to the
bookmark's page sez it's page 1.

(4) OK, so I can convet the text box to a frame. Now the cross
reference is able to get the right page number.

(5) As near I can tell, this works alright for picture+text (though I
have yet to try it on every figure). However, for table+text when I
convert text box to frame Word adds a border around every cell in the
table, and try as I might, I cannot get it to remove the border.
Hopefully with a little more head pounding I will figure out how to
remove those borders (I am able to remove some with the format:borders
and shading menu, but frustratingly not all). Then I can get on to
the issue of reformatting the table, because also in the act of
converting to a frame Word trashes my table formatting.

Thanks for your help. I appreciate it. If what I've posted above
spurs any other ideas, please let me know,
Bob H