I need just a bit more Open Office help, please

Factual Questions
1

At long last I have finally finished proofreading, correcting, editing, writing the preamble, looking up all the page numbers for seven pages of index entries, formatting, and converting my friend’s book on old radio repair. Whoo!

However, there’s one more thing I need to do. There are 20 or so illustrations to go at the end of the book. They were scanned in from paper ephemera and old books; then I cleaned them up with image editing and they’re saved as .png.

I looked up how to add images to .odt files (with the “insert” dialog) and that process works just fine. However, the pictures when on the page are too small. I took a batch converter, and made them 125%. Then I made them 200%. But no matter what size the input picture is, it comes out the same size on the book page.

Is there something I’m missing? Do I need to crop the space around the scanned image, and then enlarge THAT?

2

when I insert a picture file, there are eight boxes (each corner and middle of each side). Dragging one or more of those boxes resizes the picture

3

Correct, however only pull the ones at the corners to avoid the change of aspect ratio so the picture doesn’t looks squashed.

You can also play around with the “wrap” by right clicking onto the image if you need the writing wrap around or if the image goes behind or in front, etc.

4

Oh, I noticed the stretchable box around my insert; what I meant was, even after extending it to the edges of the page, it isn’t big enough.

5

If you have a white border in the image, you need to resize the image until it’s bigger than the page, so that the border ends up off the page.
Or, get rid of the border in an image editor.

Also, if the image is not the same aspect ratio as the page you are going to end up cropping on side or the other.

6

The image can only be as big as the page is, most likely there’s a big broad boarder around the image - meaning you need to crop the image.

How to crop with Open Office after inserting it:

  • right click onto the image

  • select “Picture”

  • in the pop up select the tap “crop”

  • make sure the “Keep scale” is selected

  • adjust the “Left”, “Right”, “Top” and “Bottom” to slice the borders off

  • then press “OK”

  • if you made a mistake or want to revert, just click onto “Reset”

Here’s a YouTube Video on how to crop in Open Office.

Alternatively you can do that in an external image editor, depending on what program you have available.