Blindingly obvious trick when optimising figure positioning

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:19 -0500 15/3/13, Nancy Allison wrote:

>I appreciated your posting your original insight. In 20+ years of using FrameMaker, I had never thought of it! Thanks very much for sharing the info.

Thank you, Nancy.

Page balancing (of books) is something I only do at the end, for obvious reasons. It's usually a nightmare of some sort, particularly when authors have lots of figures; when you position one nicely (publishers hate white space at the bottom of a page) it can collide with following figures, so this time I am trying to be consistent, especially as I have some two-page figures that must span a spread.

I am avoiding floating figures completely, aside from the right-hand portion of a two-page figure: *every* frame anchor sits in a tiny blank para tag of its own, which makes it easy to hook them with a 'find'. The figure references are (temporarily) highlighted: by repositioning the figures using the anchor paras, and sometimes blocks of text as well, I'm finding it a lot easier to balance pages than when using anchors set in text paras and float options (it's been known for figures to float out of numerical sequence!)

Not sure if I'm explaining this clearly.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]