Hi Dave,
Thanks for the detailed account. I see what you mean, and I think I can explain
what you're seeing. But I don't think there's any simple way around the
problem...
Frames are old technology, dating back to the very early days of Word. They've
been around long before the existing textboxes and other graphics stuff, which
has gone through two or three major changes and isn't "native" to Word like
frames are. At a certain point (Word 2002 as I recall), the Word dev team was
faced with a problem about how objects are anchored and the information stored
in Word's binary file format. At that time, for some reason, some of the
information for frames (and tables) started getting stored in more than one
paragraph mark. Some kind of "overrun". Suddenly, moving the paragraph with the
anchor didn't necessarily take the anchor with it; the anchor appear next to one
paragraph, but the link is actually with the preceding one. A real PITA (I was
working with a book template at the time that had call-outs in frames).
I first thought you could perhaps format the one paragraph mark as "hidden", or
as a StyleSeparator. But I notice that in this situation the paragraph won't
"collapse". Then I thought I could use a font size of 1 pt and set the line
spacing to exactly 1 pt. However (and this substantiates the thesis that the
link is to the first paragraph, while the anchor is to the second) this also
affects the formatting of the first paragraph in the frame.
Hmmmm. Would it help you to use the GROUP option? Don't try to put the frames
into single content controls. Insert them "straight", containing a content
control if you need access to the text content of the frame. Then select the
whole document (or a section of it) and use the Group command (this effectively
puts all the selection into one "super" content control that the user can't
see). You can then lock the group control so that the user can work only in
content controls and can't touch anything outside them (including the frames).
It is actually quite tricky to get a frame in there. If you create a textbox,
convert to a frame, select the frame and then press the button to insert a
content control, it puts the content control _inside_ the frame. If you
create the frame, select the paragraph to which it is anchored and press the
CC button, it puts a CC in _before_ the paragraph, but still not around the
frame. The only way I can find of doing it is to select the paragraph before
the anchor _and_ the anchored paragraph and insert a CC, hence the two
paragraph marks.
Then, of course, it becomes worse. I want to record multiple frames - all
in CCs - in building blocks and paste them into a document. Every time I do
this, two more paragraphs are inserts, of course, although multiple frames
can be anchored to one point normally, even when they are recorded in a
building block (Quick Part).
When you insert the recorded normal frame quick part, it puts the frame in
and anchors to the current paragrph. Do it again, and the subsequent frame
anchor to the same paragraph. Try that with the CC surrounded frames recorded
in quick parts and you get two carriage returns as well each time.
Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org
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