Can't fix gap in text

[nite hawk]

When wrapping an image in open office writer, the text beside the picture often gets "strung out" with large gaps between the words and if I try to "back space" to bring them closer together, instead of only moving it back a little bit, it crams the words tight together without a normal sized gap between words. I have tried cutting and pasting the words the proper distance apart, but it will not work. I have tried to re-size the picture or move it around, and once in a while I can get the words the proper distance apart, but most of the time, they are still "strung out". They are either way too far apart, or crammed tight against each other..
Anyone have an idea how to fix this problem? I tried to upload a picture of the problem, but it says the picture is too big to upload...
Thanks

[robleyd]

A sample file showing the problem would be far more useful than a picture. If the file is too big to upload here then use a file sharing site and post the link here.

[RoryOF]

It is possible that the paragraph style in use has two settings that could affect this: one is that it is set _not_ to allow hyphenation; the other is that its last line setting is set to Justified, which forces the last line to be improperly spaced. The usual last line setting is for left aligned.

[Bill]

When wrapping an image in open office writer, the text beside the picture often gets "strung out" with large gaps between the words and if I try to "back space" to bring them closer together, instead of only moving it back a little bit, it crams the words tight together without a normal sized gap between words.

This can happen when you set the paragraph to "justified" alignment. When text is justified, the text is aligned with the right margin and with the left edge of any object placed in the text. Writer has to increase or decrease the spacing between words to accomplish the alignment. If you want to always have a "normal" spacing between the words, then you have to change the alignment to "Left", but that will result in ragged alignment of the text at the right margin and objects.

[nite hawk]

Thanks for the replies---because this is a book, I have the whole document "justified" and when I tried to "align left" it seemed to cure the problem with the text being strung out beside a "wrapped picture" but it threw very thing else off--my titles which I had centered and-the justified edges... So I had to go through and straighten up the "justification" and the chapter titles..
So is there anything at all that I can do to get the text reasonably together instead of strung out??? I prefer to "wrap" pictures instead of taking up a good portion of the page with a picture.. Any thoughts would be appreciated..
thanks

[John_Ha]

Upload a single page .odt file showing the problem so the correct advice can be given. Use the Upload attachment tab below where you type (128 kB max); or use a file share site, Dropbox or Google Drive for a larger file.

In principle, if the line length by the side of the image is short the text will look bad and look even worse if your words are long as there will be large gaps. Do a simple test using a string of single characters like a b c d e ..., and they will fill the line nicely.

[Bill]

So is there anything at all that I can do to get the text reasonably together instead of strung out??? I prefer to "wrap" pictures instead of taking up a good portion of the page with a picture.

There are few options. When text is justified, it must be expanded or contracted to get the proper alignment on each end of the line of text. To make the problem less noticeable, you either have to increase the space available for text (make the pictures smaller), increase the number of spaces in the text (use shorter words) or selectively expand the space between some of the characters in the words so the spaces between the words become smaller.

[RoryOF]

The last line setting in any paragraph style using justification ought usually be set to left. You may also need to play with the hyphenation options for that paragraph style to get nice word breaking on the justified section. Such hyphenation options can be applied locally (direct formatting), applying to only that instance of the text wrap-around; it is possible that for another image and different text these will need to be changed, so local formatting may be best. In some cases a little rewrite, such as substitution of a semi-colon for "and" or "but" will avoid an unpleasant hyphenation.

[nite hawk]

Because I am still in the " learning curve," for now, until I learn more about how all this works, I am trying to re-size the pictures to get the gaps to look better. When I learn a bit more I will try to conquer this issue..
thanks for all the replies..

[RoryOF]

A useful intro to formatting in OpenOffice is
Writer for students (several languages)

[nite hawk]

checking it out--thanks