Well, I hope everyone has been having a good April. Here in Rochester it’s rainy right now, but it’s warmer out, so that’s good. It’s certainly nice to be out of winter.
I don’t really have much in the way of a revelation right now, but I do have some venting. Namely, this concerns OpenOffice, which I use in place of MS Office (GNU/Linux user that I am). Now, back when I used Word regularly things would frustrate me regarding how exactly one would go about laying out a page of text, especially with pictures. I remember times when I’d have to fight with the program to make it do what I wanted. Now, I accept responsibility for part of this, not being as familiar as I could have been. But still if you want to do an advanced layout, Word isn’t the best choice. In fact, word processors in general aren’t. It’s really better to use a typesetting language like LaTeX, something I’d wished I’d gotten the hang of earlier on. But I never did.
Now, for my lab reports and such I dutifully use OpenOffice Writer. Which works, but now I’m running into similar problems as I did with Word back in the day. Now, specifically I mean having my entire document rearranged just trying to move a picture up slightly. Sometimes I couldn’t move an image a little too the left or right. This started to get on my nerves, but after a little searching I think I can offer this bit of advice to people with similar frustrations: right-click on the image, and play with the anchor settings. If it doesn’t do what you want in one, try another. I think pictures are anchored as “As Character” by default, try playing with it.
Sorry for not being able to provide more info, but hopefully this will save someone a little time.