Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Making a comic book in Apache Openoffice, Part 2

Even if you've made a beautiful comic book with Openoffice and think you don't need to mess with anymore, shit happens.
And when you're using Openoffice, shit generally is what happens.
Say, for example, you want to change one of your pictures, and suddenly discover that you left out an entire two panels and need to put them in before someone notices.  You can't just push delete and stick it back in.  Not if you've locked each and every one of those damned images to the page beforehand.  Why on earth would you ever lock the images to the page?  The explanation about that is in my previous post about this subject.
Here's the fat and the skinny:  If your missing page is early in the book, you have to delete two panels to make room for the missing page.  That means you have to go "file insert" with that page and every single page that follows, which is incredibly tedious and annoying.
If you go in the reverse, it's just as bad.  When you work from the bottom, even though you have the advantage of moving everything down without going into "file insert", you'll have text from the next ten pages creeping behind your images every damn time.  Translation:  My blurb for buying more comics got smashed up between two comic panels, and the to be continued line went up behind other comics when the damn comic wasn't even at the ending yet.
Position locking:
It's always nice to position an image perfectly on a page then have it shoved off register arbitrarily by a self righteous program just because you change it from lock to "paragraph" to "lock to page."
Autosave:
You have two options when dealing with the autosave function.  You can either leave it the way it is, and endure it randomly saving every minute, and wait ten minutes to be able to touch the controls, or disable it, and lose all your work if the program becomes unstable (which is more often than you think, especially if you don't save every minute).
It probably crashes just to spite you whenever you disable autosave, more than likely as a program feature.