Mac Forum / Applications / Word / February 2006

Hi Dave:

Nope.  Text boxes are anchored at an absolute offset from the position of
the anchor point in the document.  In other words, "So many twips to the
right of, and so many twips down from" the anchor point.

A "twip" is a twentieth of a point, the measurement Word uses internally for
high precision measurements.

The anchor point is always the extreme beginning of the paragraph containing
the anchor point.  You can reveal them on screen using Word Preferences.

The problem we have is that whenever the printer driver, font, font metrics,
display driver, display metrics etc change, all of the relative positions
are recalculated from the top of the document.  This results in slight
variations due to rounding errors and other variations (for example,
"pixels" are not necessarily the same shape on a PC and a Mac, font
designers know this and adjust their fonts accordingly).  These errors build
up on each other the further down the document you get.

I try very hard to avoid using any kind of "floating" object, for this
reason.  Just going from PC to PC you will get variations in the positioning
and wrapping of floating objects.

So my 'cure' to your problem would be simply to figure out a way to do
without the text boxes.  There is, as you have discovered, no way to make a
text box "not" float: that's their purpose, to produce "floating text runs".
But they're graphics objects, and they will wander around: you can't prevent
it.

I usually use a combination of tables and frames to produce the effects I am
looking for.

However, if I absolutely MUST produce a desktop-publishing effect in Word
(rather than using a page layout program to do the job properly)  the
technique I use quite a bit is "Insert Object".  This is a bit of a fiddle,
and it's quite an advanced technique -- you will have "limited" success
teaching unskilled users to employ it :-)  Here it is:

1)  In Microsoft Word, use the Insert>Object menu item, and choose the
"Microsoft Word Picture" entry.

2)  This opens up a small square drawing space.

3)  Not that a small floating toolbar will appear containing only one
button.  Do NOT close this toolbar!!

4)  In that space, arrange all of the objects you want to stay together.
Get them exactly right...

5)  When you have finished, click the "Reset Picture Boundary" button to
expand the picture boundaries to the extremities of your drawing objects.
Observe the effect.

6)  If any of your objects moved out of alignment:

A) Draw a square large enough to contain all of your objects

B) Send the square To the Back

C) Remove the outline from the square, and set its fill to No Fill

D)  Rearrange your objects on the square

E)  Click Reset Picture Boundary again.  This shrinks the boundary to the
extremities of the square.

7)  When all is good, click Close Picture on the little toolbar.

The result is a complete graphic as a single unit.  It sits inline with the
text and will not wander around or break apart, no matter how the text
removes around it.

You can put text boxes, lines, bitmaps, vectors, anything you like in there.
What you have actually created is a document nested within your document,
and embedded in it is a "drawing canvas".  The drawing canvas is a vector
space: Word anchors each object within that space using scalable
measurements that it can readjust as necessary to preserve exact relativity.

So:  You "can" produce very accurate page layout in Microsoft Word.  If you
had to do this "often" you would NOT use Word to do this.  This kind of
thing is what QuarkExpress was designed to do, and what word-processors are
designed to prevent.  But Word will do it, if you force it to.  And that's
how...

The next version of Word will probably insert the canvas automatically, but
Mac Word 2004 does not, so you have to do it manually.

Hope this helps

On 8/2/06 6:20 AM, in article
1139340004.138472.294600@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, "Dave"
<d2wagner@earthlink.net> wrote: