Flowing Text Around Tables

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zwick_genetics
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Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by zwick_genetics »

One of the major limitations of NWP for my academic/grant writing is the apparent inability to provide a legend for graphics. One suggestion I tried was entering the graphic into a table, and then using a table box for the figure legend. This seems to work well - except that it does not seem possible to flow text around a table (since I presume the Table is treated as a character). So your table/figure takes up more lines than it should have to.
Is there a way to flow text around a table?
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greenmorpher
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Post by greenmorpher »

Hiya zweck

You could make up your tables on separate pages, save them as PDFs, then place them into your grant document as graphics.

I think!

Just tested a PDF -- yes, you can insert a PDF as a graphic. Your problem would be getting rid of the unnecessary page surrounds when you made the PDF. You would have to have a page with near zero margins that the table just fitted on.

Presumably you could use LinkBack to allow updating of the table from the table document.

A nice feature would be something that allowed users to convert tables to graphics on the fly

Classic NW allowed you to place NW pages within NW pages.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now for just $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.
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xiamenese
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Re: Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by xiamenese »

zwick_genetics wrote:One of the major limitations of NWP for my academic/grant writing is the apparent inability to provide a legend for graphics. One suggestion I tried was entering the graphic into a table, and then using a table box for the figure legend. This seems to work well - except that it does not seem possible to flow text around a table (since I presume the Table is treated as a character). So your table/figure takes up more lines than it should have to.
Is there a way to flow text around a table?
Could you not produce the graphics together with their legend — if necessary as a table — export them in a suitable graphics format such as PDF and then place flow the text around that. The one disadvantage of course being that you would have to build your own list of illustrations, it couldn't be done for you.

Mark
zwick_genetics
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Re: Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by zwick_genetics »

Thanks for the suggestions. Of course it is possible to make a graphic, but when you are fitting a document within a set number of pages, and shrink the graphic to save space, you also reduce the size of the figure legend (which is not what you would want to do - you may want to reduce the size of the graphic, but keep the legend the same size). It would be far nicer to be able to do this on the fly without resorting to so many steps involved in generating a figure.
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xiamenese
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Re: Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by xiamenese »

zwick_genetics wrote:Thanks for the suggestions. Of course it is possible to make a graphic, but when you are fitting a document within a set number of pages, and shrink the graphic to save space, you also reduce the size of the figure legend (which is not what you would want to do - you may want to reduce the size of the graphic, but keep the legend the same size). It would be far nicer to be able to do this on the fly without resorting to so many steps involved in generating a figure.
True, but if you happen to use a graphics app like OmniGraffle which supports LinkBack, you could do the resizing in that, which would allow you to resize the graphic itself and not the legend part.

But I agree, being able to have floating frames round which text would wrap would be a great step forward.

Mark
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scottwhitlock
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Re: Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by scottwhitlock »

Yep...I've requested this before (maybe not as much as Greenmorpher requests verticle rulers, but I do what I can...:) ) A text box feature would be another option as well.

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greenmorpher
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Re: Flowing Text Around Tables

Post by greenmorpher »

Hiya Scotty

You can use a once cell table for a text box, of course. But the next question is how to get the general text to flow around that. :D
Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.
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