Alvaro Deibe Diaz wrote:

> Sorry. I think I don't undestand you. If I place an illustration with a
> caption, and then I tell the illustration to be, say, floating at the top of
> the page, then the illustration goes to the top, but the caption remains in
> the same place, in the middle of the text, where it was before. This is the
> reason I have to place both the illustration and its caption in a "floating
> container". In my Word 2003 I have 3 containers: text boxes, frames, and
> "lienzos de dibujo" (literally: "picture canvas", or something like that). I
> am missing something here?

Probably not, I'm not sure. To say the truth, I don't work a lot with
illustrations that are not in the flow of the text, and with the ones that
are, this problem doesn't happen. So I just assumed that the caption would
go with it when changing the positioning -- which it doesn't :) 

But you can create it when the illustration is correctly positioned, it
gets created as a text frame, you position it next to the illustration, and
group the two together in an object -- and bingo, the caption is gone from
the index of figures and generally not available as reference anymore :)

I've never encountered this, and I'd classify it as simple bug. Which made
me research a bit... and I found "frames". That's a typical
Microsoft-approach: they add a workaround instead of solving the issue. So
references don't work in text boxes? The code architecture sucks, so we
can't add that feature easily? Let's introduce frames, with features that
are a sub-set of text boxes (so they are essentially not necessary), but
they may contain references. 

So what you'd have to do is: 
- Add an illustration.
- Position it the way you want it.
- Add a caption. If the positioning is out of flow, that caption will be a
text box. (Which is the obvious choice, of course, but it kind of clashes
with the fact that the caption will be created as a reference -- which it
should be --, but you won't be able to reference that reference from
anywhere, because references in text boxes don't work. So you wonder why
Word creates references in text boxes when it can't reference them... :)
- Position that caption next to the picture the way you want it.
- Open the caption's text box format dialog and convert it to a frame.

Seems to work.

That's probably what you are doing with your "marco" -- not sure though
(see below about translating user interface elements :).

OTOH, the help does state that captions in text boxes are supposed to work.
Maybe there's something /very/ special -- and not at all intuitive, and not
even well-documented -- that you need to do to make it work (again
typically Microsoft :)  Or it might be that the help is simply wrong. 


> I suppose Microsoft translated only the elemental user interface. The
> kernel remains untranslated. My VBA code talks english, and my interface
> (both Word and VBA) spanish. Sometimes this gives me some "interesting"
> problems. 

I thought they had fixed that some time ago. Apparently they only fixed the
VBA part. That was at the time the reason for me to only use English
Microsoft products, and I've stayed with it. It pretty much sucks when you
always have to translate all VBA macros you find and want to check out. I
can see the reasoning behind naming the interface elements in the macro
language similar to how they appear in the user interface -- but then of
course the program should be able to understand macros in all languages it
has user interfaces for.

I guess as well as Word works for most standard text processing tasks, when
you dig a bit, you'll always encounter those typical Microsoft style
"features" :)

Gerhard
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