LaTeX seems to have a preference for placing figures together on a page, and placing surrounding text on a separate page. Can I somehow change that balance a bit, as I prefer figures to break up the text to avoid too black text-heavy pages.
Example:
\section{Some section}
[Half a page of text]
\begin{figure}
[...]
\caption{Figure text 1}
\end{figure}
[Half a page of text]
\begin{figure}
[...]
\caption{Figure text 2}
\end{figure}
[More text]
So what LaTeX usually does is to stack the two half pages of text on a single page, and the figures on the following page. I believe this really gives a bad balance, and bores the reader. So can I change that somehow?
I know about postfixing the \begin{figure} with [ht!], but often it does not really matter. I would like to configure the balancing algorithms in LaTeX to naturally prefer pages with combined figures and text.
Try putting the following in your preamble.
\setcounter{topnumber}{2}
\setcounter{bottomnumber}{2}
\setcounter{totalnumber}{4}
\renewcommand{\topfraction}{0.85}
\renewcommand{\bottomfraction}{0.85}
\renewcommand{\textfraction}{0.15}
\renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{0.7}
You might play with those numbers a little to suit your own preferences. Some explanations of the different parameters are given here.
Try to tune floats positioning with:
\begin{figure}[tb] for figures that fit well in a page with text (say, half of the text height for the figure and the other half for the text)
\begin{figure}[p] for floats large enough to require a dedicated page.
Also, you can place some "barriers" for floats positioning with the packages placeins or afterpage.
Try
\makeatletter
\#colnum 1 % Or 2. It is the max of the float insertions at the top of the page.
\makeatother
Related
I am having issues with a report I am writing. First time using latex and after getting some help on here regarding some tables weirdness I again have a silly frustrating issue. Figures don't stay where I put them. I made a MWE Posted Below
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{ {./Figures/} }
%%%%%% Referencing %%%%%%
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat}
\setcitestyle{authoryear,open={(},close={)}}
\title{MWE}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Introduction}
The average sea surface temperature (SST) trend is shown in Figure \ref{fig:SST}.
\section{Figures}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width = \linewidth]{Figures/SST.png}
\label{fig:SST}
\end{figure}
\section{References}
\bibliography{References.bib}
\bibliographystyle{agsm}
\end{document}
I expect, probably an error, for the figure to be inserted under the Figures subheading however it appears on the next page after references. I have to refer to my figure in the text, hence the \ref{fig:SST} so it is clickable. It's not a size issue as there is more than enough space on the page to accommodate the figure. Even if that was the issue I would expect the references subheading to be after it.
Most latex classes use so called floats for figures, tables etc. The idea is that latex will automatically find a good place for your images and avoid ugly white space.
To make use of the abilities of latex to produce a good looking output, you must specify possible placements with floating specifier such as [htbp], which allows latex to place the image here, at the top, at the bottom or an a separate page.
Also if you want to use the \label-\ref mechanism, your figure must have a caption (and the label inside or after the caption).
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{ {./Figures/} }
%%%%%% Referencing %%%%%%
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat}
\setcitestyle{authoryear,open={(},close={)}}
\title{MWE}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Introduction}
The average sea surface temperature (SST) trend is shown in Figure \ref{fig:SST}.
\section{Figures}
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\includegraphics[width = \linewidth]{example-image-duck}
\caption{test}
\label{fig:SST}
\end{figure}
\section{References}
\bibliography{References.bib}
\bibliographystyle{agsm}
\end{document}
Generally, LaTeX's attitude is ‘you write the text, let me worry about placing the figures’.
Floats (that is, figures and tables) will float to where LaTeX thinks they go best. I can't remember the precise rules in the article style, but generally they float to the top of the nearest following page that has room for them. LaTeX won't fill too much of a page with figures, so if you have a dense sequence of large-ish figures, some of them can end up quite a long way away from the point in the source text where they're written.
This is normal, and how figures and tables appear in the majority of published books and articles.
You'll usually write a caption:
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{...blah...}
\caption{This is a caption for my figure\label{fig:SST}}
\end{figure}
Then you can write
...this is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:SST}
If you want to, you might add ...on p.\thinspace\pageref{fig:SST} and LaTeX will insert the page number where the figure ends up. Also, see the prettyref package.
As mentioned in the other answer, you can add placement specifiers like [ht], which give LaTeX permission to put the figure ‘here’ or at the top of a page, but that doesn't force anything. It is possible to fight with LaTeX about this (the Overleaf docs give some hints), but it's generally not worth it in my experience.
That said, one bit of guidance it's useful to give LaTeX is something like \renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{.8}, which says that LaTeX is allowed to use as much as 80% of the page for floats (ie, figures and tables) – the default value is a bit tight (there are more comments on this in this TeX.SE question – tex.stackexchange.com is generally a better site for LaTeX-related questions).
If you do feel compelled to fight/fiddle with float placement, do it at the very end of the process, where you're fine-tuning the punctuation of your document. Small changes in the document can have big effects on where floats end up, and it's simply not worth worrying about this until your document is almost finalised.
Your final puzzlement was about the figure ending up after the references. In the case of your document, the figure goes on p.2, so there's plenty of space on p.1 for LaTeX to carry on setting text, so naturally it puts the references there. Since you generally do want the references to go at the very end of an article, this is a case where it's reasonable to exert a little control over placement, and a good idea would be to put \clearpage before the References section. What that does is to make a new page and force out any floats which are still in the queue waiting for space to appear.
Looking for the best way to fit a figure tightly that spans the full height of a page. I'm writing a document about the ionosphere and want to include this image along the side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosphere#/media/File:EarthAtmosphereBig.jpg
Seems like a job for minipage but I can't quite figure out a good solution. Any tips?
You can achieve this by placing two minipages, one with a larger width than the other, side-by-side.
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx} %demo option should be omitted in real document
\usepackage{lipsum} %for random text, should be omitted in real document
%--------%Shows page layout, also should be omitted in real document.
\usepackage{showframe}
\renewcommand\ShowFrameLinethickness{0.15pt}
\renewcommand*\ShowFrameColor{\color{red}}
%--------%Idea from Zarko of TEX.SE
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth}
\lipsum[1-3]
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[r]{0.2\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.2\textwidth, height=\textheight]{demo.png}
\end{minipage}
\end{document}
I am writing a personal statement in latex. I don't want the big margin at the top of the page not big title taking a lot of space. I just like to make the layout compact but still clearly spaced with title, name and other necessary information, since there may be restriction on the number of pages. One example would be http://www.hsc.unt.edu/education/CIM/Documents/PS-Sample2_000.pdf. I wonder where to find some good latex templates or examples?
Thanks and regards!
I would use the geometry package to establish the desired margins. To get the margins in your sample document, try:
\usepackage[left=1in,right=1in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}
Your next requirement was to fix the title block. LaTeX uses the internal command \#maketitle to format the title block. You can redefine this as you like. To achieve the same title block style as in the sample document, use:
\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}% provides colors for text
\makeatletter% since there's an at-sign (#) in the command name
\renewcommand{\#maketitle}{%
\begin{center}
\parskip\baselineskip% skip a line between paragraphs in the title block
\parindent=0pt% don't indent paragraphs in the title block
\textcolor{red}{\bf\#title}\par
\textbf{\#author}\par
%\#date% remove the percent sign at the beginning of this line if you want the date printed
\end{center}
}
\makeatother% resets the meaning of the at-sign (#)
The \#title, \#author, and \#date commands will print the title, author, and date. You can use whatever formatting commands you like to set the text in bold, different colors, etc.
Put all of the above commands in the preamble of the document. The preamble is the space between \documentclass and \begin{document}.
\documentclass{article}
% this is the preamble
% put all of the above code in here
\title{Personal Statement}
\author{Tim}
\begin{document}
\maketitle% prints the title block
Emergency medicine has always been a passion of mine\ldots
\end{document}
Attempt #1: I've used the following style file, which I call cramp2e, for similar purposes. It is probably not right for you, but have a look:
\oddsidemargin -1cm
\evensidemargin -2cm
\topmargin 1cm
\textheight 24cm
\textwidth 19cm
\headheight 0cm
\headsep .7cm
\footskip .7cm
\parskip .2cm
\paperheight 25cm
\setlength\voffset{-.33in}
\setlength\hoffset{-.25in}
Any good?
Postscript This is for A4 size paper.
A slightly less LaTeX-ey solution would be to not use the \maketitle command. A couple of times I've simply used this as my title(marginsize helps too).
Set up smaller margins:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{anysize}
\marginsize{1cm}{1cm}{1cm}{1cm}
(EDIT: 1cm might be even better..)
Minimal title:
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\section*{My Document Title}
\today
\end{center}
% content goes here
\end{document}
The result looks something like:
I have a Latex document where I need to change the margins of only a few pages (the pages where I'm adding a lot of graphics).
In particular, I'd like to change the top margins (\voffset). I've tried doing:
\addtolength{\voffset}{-4cm}
% Insert images here
\addtolength{\voffset}{4cm}
but it didn't work. I've seen references to the geometry package, but I haven't found how to use it for a bunch of pages, and not for the whole document.
Any hints?
Use the "geometry" package and write \newgeometry{left=3cm,bottom=0.1cm} where you want to change your margins. When you want to reset your margins, you write \restoregeometry.
I've used this in beamer, but not for general documents, but it looks like that's what the original hint suggests
\newenvironment{changemargin}[2]{%
\begin{list}{}{%
\setlength{\topsep}{0pt}%
\setlength{\leftmargin}{#1}%
\setlength{\rightmargin}{#2}%
\setlength{\listparindent}{\parindent}%
\setlength{\itemindent}{\parindent}%
\setlength{\parsep}{\parskip}%
}%
\item[]}{\end{list}}
Then to use it
\begin{changemargin}{-1cm}{-1cm}
don't forget to
\end{changemargin}
at the end of the page
I got this from Changing margins “on the fly” in the TeX FAQ.
I was struggling a lot with different solutions including \vspace{-Xmm} on the top and bottom of the page and dealing with warnings and errors. Finally I found this answer:
You can change the margins of just one or more pages and then restore it to its default:
\usepackage{geometry}
...
...
...
\newgeometry{top=5mm, bottom=10mm} % use whatever margins you want for left, right, top and bottom.
...
... %<The contents of enlarged page(s)>
...
\restoregeometry %so it does not affect the rest of the pages.
...
...
...
PS:
1- This can also fix the following warning:
LaTeX Warning: Float too large for page by ...pt on input line ...
2- For more detailed answer look at this.
3- I just found that this is more elaboration on Kevin Chen's answer.
\par\vfill\break % Break Last Page
\advance\vsize by 8cm % Advance page height
\advance\voffset by -4cm % Shift top margin
% Start big page
Some pictures
% End big page
\par\vfill\break % Break the page with different margins
\advance\vsize by -8cm % Return old margings and page height
\advance\voffset by 4cm % Return old margings and page height
For figures you can use the method described here :
http://texblog.net/latex-archive/layout/centering-figure-table/
namely, do something like this:
\begin{figure}[h]
\makebox[\textwidth]{%
\includegraphics[width=1.5\linewidth]{bla.png}
}
\end{figure}
Notice that if you have subfigures in the figure, you'll probably want to enter into paragraph mode inside the box, like so:
\begin{figure}[h]
\makebox[\textwidth]{\parbox{1.5\textwidth}{ %
\centering
\subfigure[]{\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{a.png}}
\subfigure[]{\includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{b.png}}
\end{figure}
For allowing the figure to be centered in the page, protruding into both margins rather than only the right margin.
This usually does the trick for images. Notice that with this method, the caption of the image will still be in the delimited by the normal margins of the page (which is a good thing).
A slight modification of this to change the \voffset works for me:
\newenvironment{changemargin}[1]{
\begin{list}{}{
\setlength{\voffset}{#1}
}
\item[]}{\end{list}}
And then put your figures in a \begin{changemargin}{-1cm}...\end{changemargin} environment.
Look up \enlargethispage in some LaTeX reference.
I could not find a easy way to set the margin for a single page.
My solution was to use vspace with the number of centimeters of empty space I wanted:
\vspace*{5cm}
I put this command at the beginning of the pages that I wanted to have +5cm of margin.
This worked for me:
\newpage % larger page1
\enlargethispage{1.5cm} % more room for text or floats
\advance\voffset by -0.5cm % reduce top margin
\advance\footskip by 1cm % lower page number
Some content
\newpage % larger page2
\enlargethispage{1.5cm}
Some content
...
\newpage % return to normal page
\advance\voffset by 0.5cm
\advance\footskip by -1cm
I had the same problem in a beamer presentation. For me worked using the columns environment:
\begin{frame}
\begin{columns}
\column{1.2\textwidth}
\begin{figure}
\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=.49\textwidth]{1.png}}
\subfigure{\includegraphics[width=.49\textwidth]{2.png}}
\end{figure}
\end{columns}
\end{frame}
In LaTeX figures, one can use \textwidth and \columnwidth to specify sizes of the graphic relative to the size of surrounding text, e.g.
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{myimage}.
I would like to easily switch from onecolumn to twocolumn template (and back) without the figure growing too large for onecolumn template. For twocolumn template (where \columnwidth is roughly half the \textwidth), I would like to have something like:
\includegraphics[width=.9\columnwidth]{myimage}.
and for onecolumn template (where \columnwidth and \textwidth are equal):
\includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth]{myimage}.
Now, I figured I could limit this using some kind of a min operator:
\includegraphics[width=min(.5\textwidth,.9\columnwidth)]{myimage} but this is invalid syntax. Is there something like this to solve this problem, possibly through the use of LaTeX macro system?
Although it's possible to write this sort of macro, I wouldn't want to hardcode it into each figure; how about something like this
\makeatletter
\newlength \figwidth
\if#twocolumn
\setlength \figwidth {0.9\columnwidth}
\else
\setlength \figwidth {0.5\textwidth}
\fi
\makeatother
and then use
\includegraphics[width=\figwidth]{myimage}
to insert the graphic.
\textwidth is the horizontal width of the page body and not really appropriate for your purposes.
\linewidth is the width of the current line; it will be updated appropriate to columns, indentation, etc.
The following paragraph produces a picture that should precisely fit the entire line width (i.e. no overful warning):
\noindent\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{myimage}
If you prefer small margins on the left and right, you can use:
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{myimage}
\end{center}
Or, if you want to specify the margins in an absolute size:
\usepackage{calc}
...
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth-20pt]{myimage}
\end{center}
Hmm... the code above (\if#twocolumn etc.) is not working for me at all. No idea why not. :( tetex on osX using fink. Trying to use revtex4, so perhaps that's the problem. I really like the idea of this type of change because I'm going to be dorking with widths etc. for my thesis and various journal articles, and to have these distances specified with a macro may be helpful for these types of conversions.
Any comments greatly appreciated!
-Allen
Somebody else who is more familiar with this will probably answer, but note that you would also need to change your figure type to be figure* if you are going two-column.