How to align "pages of floats" to the top margin? - latex

If I include [p] in the placement specifier of a \begin{figure} environment, figure floats may be placed on a dedicated page. However, at least in the "book" document class, floats are centered vertically on those pages.
How do I force all "pages-o-floats" to be aligned to the top margin (just like normal text pages)?

I believe your answer is in the UK TeX FAQ:
\#fptop defines the distance from the top of the page to the top of the first float
The simple fix is to reset \#fptop in your preamble:
\makeatletter
\setlength{\#fptop}{0pt}
\makeatother
However, you might find that this is a bit too high, so you might want something like 5pt instead. (Anyway, the FAQ entry is well worth reading; it explains in more depth what's going on than I am here.)

can you not use the [t] specifier instead of [p]?

Related

Swapping odd/even margin in Latex

I'm writing something that I would like to print in Latex and I'm using the book documentclass.
The standard behaviour is to consider odd pages (so the rear of a double sided paper) as the beginning of chapters and document too, I would like to swap them to be able to have correct margins: on an even page right margin is greater than left one, I need the opposite..
Does a simple snippet exist to achieve this thing?
Thanks in advance
Margins can be modified using the geometry package. The inner and outer arguments to this package control the margins you want to change:
\usepackage[a4paper,inner=3.5cm,outer=2.5cm]{geometry} % Or w/e

Latex - Change margins of only a few pages

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}

Math operator in specifying figure width in LaTeX

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.

How do I prevent LaTeX from padding spaces between paragraphs so that next section begins at top of next page?

I have a two-column paper where space restrictions are very tight.
I just looked at my last version of the manuscript and saw that the upper half contains a figure (as expected), but in the lower half there is a lot of vertical space between paragraphs (enough to squeeze 10 more lines), and that LaTeX probably added it so that in the beginning of the next page a new numbered section will begin at the top of the page.
I know there's a way to adjust this so LaTeX doesn't try so hard, but I'm not sure how. any help? Thanks!
The parameter that controls inter-paragraph spacing is called \parskip(See Paragraph Spacing ). You set it (with "rubber" values) using something like:
\setlength{\parskip}{1cm plus4mm minus3mm}
The defualt value of \parskip is class dependent. The "plus" and "minus" parts tell TeX how much it can adjust the value to improve the layout (that is they make the spacing elastic, thus the "rubber" designation). Reducing (or eliminating) the "plus" part of the rubber might help.
Watch out though, you can cause other layout artifacts if you constrain TeX too much.
Other things to think about:
The widow and club penalties probably apply section headings, and may be affecting TeX's layout choices (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/512967/how-can-one-keep-a-section-from-being-at-the-end-of-a-page-in-latex for a discussion).
You may also want to consider messing with \baselineskip which controls the allowed spacing between lines of text and can also have rubber values.
This is a common problem, and there are probably some fairly sophisticated treatments already prepared on CTAN.
\vfill before the new section worked perfectly for me.

"spurious" leading in latex

the following latex input:
\rule{1cm}{1cm}\\
\rule{1cm}{1cm}
leaves a gap of about .35mm between the boxes. what is the length that defines this gap?
Edit: I was only partly right at first, but GoogleBooks knew. It pointed me at A Beginner's Book of TeX
By Raymond Seroul, Silvio Levy, Silvio Vieira Ferreira Levy, which says:
Three variables control this behavior \baselineskip, \lineskip and \lineskiplimit.
The default separation of lines is \baselineskip, but boxes are not allowed to come closer than \lineskiplimit. If they would, the vertical spacing is adjusted until \lineskip space lies between them...

Resources