[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 113346] New: Image placement is full of bugs

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113346

            Bug ID: 113346
           Summary: Image placement is full of bugs
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: 5.4.2.2 release
          Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)
                OS: Linux (All)
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Writer
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: selkietg at gmail.com

In due course over the next week I'll work on reporting individual bugs for
these problems, and try to prepare some files to show them, with steps.

(All references here to an "image" here is to an image with captions, thus to
an image+caption in a frame.  All images I was working with were intended to
occupy most of the page they appeared on.)

Images move dramatically: large distances from where they're anchored, whether
you anchor them to a paragraph or to a character.

Images, when they move unexpectedly, can even move before earlier images.

Images, when text is edited, can "vanish".

Image vanishing can be to unspecified parts of the document (disappearing from
the frame they're supposed to be within).

Body text can disappear under image frames, regardless of how the image is
anchored.  The only way to be able to see the text again is to delete the image
and then its frame, and re-insert the image.  Simply changing the anchor style
of the image is not enough to make the text visible again.  It's as if the text
is wrapped behind the image, despite having wrap turned off.

An image anchored to a paragraph can move large distances from the paragraph
it's anchored to, even though wrap is turned off.

Updating a table of cross references to captioned images, all of which are
anchored to paragraphs, changes all anchoring to a character instead.  Any
subsequent attempt to change the anchoring of any image back to a paragraph
moves the image quite unpredictably - including, outside its frame.  Editing
the text near the image will also tend to trigger this effect.

If you add a caption above or below, trying to change this placement later will
generally lead to a caption that overlaps underneath the image and is largely
(or completely) obscured.  The only way to get the caption positioned correctly
is to delete the image + frame and reinsert the image and recaption it with the
placement desired.

Inserting an image near another image is likely to cause one or all images
earlier in the document to move.

I've suffered these problems in LibreOffice and OpenOffice and StarOffice for
many years.  But it was only this month when I was preparing a document with
images for publication that I discovered how buggy the functionality was. 
Apparently it has been so for a long time, based on my own experience, and blog
articles such as
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/The-mysteries-of-positioning-pictures-in-LibreOffice-OpenOffice

A search in the bug database uncovered few if any of the bugs I experienced
(104998 and 108748 seem to be related to PDF creation). 51131 from 2012 seems
like it might be related to some of these bugs.  87272 might be related, only
in that nothing bizarre that an image in LO does would surprise me: the
behaviour is so unpredictable I have no mental model for how images are linked
into the text.

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