[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hello Bob

me13013 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.

It's always good to mention the version of Word you're using: some
people might want to test and then it's not much use w/o the version in
general; and in particular, things might indeed have changed in how Word
treats captions/bookmarks outside of the body text layer or not, IIRC.

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


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), 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 ...


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

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).

2cents
Robert
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