Vertical writing in a frame

[TheRealOrion]

I've just been experimenting with this, but I've found some odd behaviours. What I want to do is make a frame that's 1" in width and fits in the margin of an essay, but I want it to be vertical (left-to-right becomes top-to-bottom) so that I can fit more words in. The trouble is that I can't seem to figure out how to set up the frame so that the lines break when they get to the edge, and currently, when I hit "return," it seems to place a horizontal cursor below the vertical line of text and then start a new line of vertical text below the previous line of vertical text.

Anyone have any solutions to this problem?

[acknak]

If you need rotated text of almost any kind, it's usually better to use a graphics text box, from the Drawing toolbar.

The down side is that the graphics text does not have access to all the Writer styles or the full formatting capability of your Writer text, but for notes and such where the exact formatting isn't so important, they're a good alternative.

[TheRealOrion]

That's unfortunate. I actually need the formatting functions. I think I'll just make do with what I'm doing.

[TheGurkha]

As an admittedly clunky workaround you could set up a horizontal frame and then do what you want text and formatting-wise, then take a screen grap of that portion of the screen, save it, rotate the image and position the image in the document.

[TheRealOrion]

I'm looking for something more automated than that. I'm using Writer to mark essays, you see, and it's easier to pack comments into the margins if they're at a 90-degree angle.

[RoryOF]

Are we to understand that the essays are .doc or .odt? Why not position the essays on a landscape page of twice the original page size (A3 or equivalent) with a wide left margin and place your comments horizontally in that margin, which is effectively a full page width? As the object of all this is to give "paperless" correction and viewing, the screens can take care of any magnification needed, it will never have to be printed out. One template would allow you place each essay correctly, and your notes could go in place using Marginalia style.

[TheRealOrion]

That's ingenious. Part of the point is that they should be able to print out the essays, comments and all, though. If they printed out the 11"x17" page in two 8.5"x11" leaves, they could just stick them together. That's worth experimenting with, actually.

Currently, they submit as RTF's or, if I'm lucky, ODT's. The complicated bit is that, in order to grade their formatting, the pages they submit have to stay intact; they have to look just like they did when they created them. How could I stick a pre-existing, formatted RTF onto a landscaped 11"x17" page? Cut/pasting the content of their essays would be too radical a change and also kind of a pain in the butt.

[RoryOF]

A quick thought; set up a template of a horizontal sheet with a linked frame to the right, into which you insert your incoming file [edit: Insert / File]. If there is a problem with linking the frames from template page to template page, you might need to make a blank document of N linked frames and use [edit: a copy of] this as the container for the incoming (best not use rtf if formatting is important, but that is another topic). Your students could print out on Horizontal US Letter or A4, getting a reduced image of their page and of your comments.

[TheRealOrion]

Would such a frame spread across pages, though? The essays are in the range of 4 to 8 pages long.