Image in wrapped text, with caption in proper place.

[donb]

From time to time it has been asked whether there is any way to make Mellel 2.7 accept a caption under or over an image, particularly a floating image, which is in a text and thus has the text wrapped around it.

The usual answer is no; but there is a workaround which does work, though it is a tiny bit finicky:

First, place your image in your text where you want it to appear, with the text wrapping you wish.

Type your caption on a separate line in Mellel.

Do a screen shot of that particular caption text only. (In the Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard preferences you can set the way you want screenshots to be done. I have set the key F19 to make a screenshot of a selection only and save it to the clipboard a selection. You could choose whatever keyboard shortcut you prefer.)

Do a paste on your Mellel page. Mellel considers the pasted clipboard text (i.e. your caption) to be an ordinary image.

Move the caption-image to the position you want it to have (immediately above or below the image that is causing text wrapping). With careful positioning, the caption will stay with the image it refers to, and the text wrapping will also apply to it.

With some practice and ingenuity, you can get your captions exactly as you like.

Don Broadribb

[Mart°n]

I would not recommend such a hack as it has several disadvantages:

You could not search the image caption because it’s a image and not a text
The low-resolution screenshot does look ugly when printed or viewed in greater zoom levels
You’re not able to get automatic image numbering
As a result of the above, the cross-references don’t work nicely

I think the current implementation of image handling is a first step to the final feature but barely usable. As I could not imagine, that this is the best solution the Redlers could design, it may be the best solution to not use this feature at the moment, if you need images and a image caption near your image.

If one really likes to go the route outlined above by Don, I recommend a slightly different workflow.

1. Write your image captions into a separate Mellel document or a separate page of your current document.
2. Save that document, so you could later edit and re-create your image-caption images
3. Save that particular document or page as a PDF file (File > Export > PDF…)
4. Open the PDF document with the Preview.app (Vorschau - for German users)
5. Chose the „select“ tool (either in the toolbar or via Tools > Select or via CMD+3) and draw a selection around your image caption
6. Copy (CMD+C) the caption and insert it into the Mellel file

You now get a „image“ in your Mellel document but instead of being a pixelated image, it is a vector PDF image which could be printed and viewed in high magnification without problems. And, if you export such a Mellel document to PDF, the text of the pasted image captions could be found via Spotlight or Preview.app and could be selected and therefore copied like any regular text.

But remember, it’s still a hack. So let’s hope, the Redlers will improve image caption handling in the next version of Mellel.

[donb]

cat pic 2.jpg

It has been asked that I give more detail and an illustration, so here it is.
I think Grab may be a better option than Screenshot I recommended earlier. (Grab is located in the Utilities Folder which is in the Applications Folder.) Of course, for quality you will probably want to use Photoshop, or Graphic Converter, or another specialist imaging program, and you can incorporate the caption in with the image in that program, before importing it into Mellel and positioning it. But my suggestion was intended for ordinary users, who are unlikely to have the professional programs; Power Users will already know about using such programs for preparing an image for import into Mellel.

Don Broadribb

[laup]

Cats fig.png

[DylanMuir]

The answer is "plenty". What if I want to edit my text without worrying that my captions will become separated from my figures? This isn't solved by the first suggestion. What if I want a figure that sits next to a long paragraph, and causes only a portion of it to wrap? That's not possible if the entire paragraph has to sit in a separate two-column section. In your example, you have the horror of a single word wrapping over the column boundary to lie on its own above the picture. You could fix this with a column break, but when the height of the picture does not equal the height of the paragraph, you'll end up with a big empty space in one of the two columns.

Mellel is a great word processor because the developers seem to take the effort to implement things "nicely". I think their current implementation of floating graphics doesn't meet the high standard they have set for Mellel.

DRM

[donb]

I agree: my proposal does not begin to meet all the requirements for the purpose. Like many workarounds, it works for only some purposes, but not for all.

That said, a person thoroughly familiar with using the professional graphics programs -- in some instances, using more than one for a specific image -- could manage to produce most or all of the things you ask for, but I grant you it would take a lot of finicky work and oodles of time. It would be worth while only if the image were essential to some major scholarly work (I have in mind some linguistic works, such as I occasionally indulge in writing).

I too wish that Mellel had a "proper" graphics method, at least in the placement of of images with text, such as is available in Pages. But with only two programmers, and an extraordinarily complex code, I could well imagine it could take a full year or perhaps more than a year to implement this. Patience is required. Whether this particular item should be given precedence over all the other things needing to be done and regarded as "urgent" by various users, I cannot say. I have nothing to do with the programming of Mellel; but from what little experience I have of programming, I can see what an enormous task would be involved.

Don Broadribb

[laup]

Dylan, good examples that make your point; I'm sorry about that one orphan word, which I should have avoided.

I also agree with Don's comments. My bottom line is that if we think in terms of functionality having a percentage, then the functionality for the wrapped graphics is now fairly high, especially for a free update. "High standards" shouldn't necessarily be translated into "requirements for very high functionality."

We all have our preferences about priorities, but I would put the priority elsewhere. I suppose that mine would be the nontrivial challenge of achieving track-changes in a Word-compatible version (accepting a high percentage of compatibility a good enough).

PKD

[Flo]

Just found a way to ‘tie’ captions to pictures, so the caption won’t flow to the other page without the picture. It’s not for the option discussed above in this thread; it leaves very limited options to place the picture, and most of the experienced users will know this. But since I just discovered the ‘keep with’-option, I’ll share this for all those who are new to this.

Open a new document and hit 4 times ‘return/enter’ to create 4 paragraphs A, B, C, D. A and D are for the main text, B is for the picture and C for the caption. In paragraph C, enter a word for the caption. Then, place the cursor in paragraph B. Go to Style Set > Edit Style Sets... and create a new paragraph style. Double click that style, check the option ‘keep lines together,’ and enter 1 for the option ‘keep with next lines’. Click save and ok, and then apply this new style to paragraph B (only to paragraph B).
Then, drag and drop a picture into paragraph B (for trying this out maybe not an oversized one). It won’t look neat, since the settings of the picture are not right. Double click the picture and at the bottom options for ‘image wrapping,’ choose ‘inline’. Click ok. Now you’ll have to place the picture again: Drag it, and in addition to the arrow-cursor, you’ll see a text-cursor – drop the picture when the text-cursor is located exactly in paragraph B.

That’s it. This caption will stick with the picture. By choosing left, center, or right alignment in the paragraph options, you can choose where the picture is located. As you can see, though, this doesn’t allow for text flow around the image. (If your caption is longer than one line, you’ll have to create another paragraph style that you use for captions (here: paragraph C) and in which the option ‘keep lines together’ is activated, but not the option ‘keep with next lines’. And if you want to include that caption into a table of content, use a tag flow that is formatted with your paragraph style for captions.)

(This does not work with tables, although the paragraph which the table is located in does not necessarily need to share the same style as the paragraph inside the table. So while applying the above mentioned paragraph style for pictures (incl. the keep with option) for the paragraph 'outside' the table works, the caption does not stick with the table.)

[tika-tika]

I just make a single-celled table and put the caption and image in the cell. I make the table borders invisible. Then they are always together since the cell doesn't break across pages. Because I am desperate for text to wrap around images with captions, sometimes I make two columns and put about the right amount of text in the other column, but this is really a hack for what is a much-needed feature in Mellel for writers who want a formatted document.

[tika-tika]

This is something I was really hoping for in Mellel 3.1. Hopefully there is some action on this important weakness.

[mikejt]

Ditto. Images in frames/text boxes, and auto-titles and anything else in frames, too. Text boxes/frames anywhere, too ... as table cells, and inside other text boxes/frames ...