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Graphics

Graphics can be produced

• from within LaTeX - pictures can be drawn in a picture environment, but you'll find graph paper handy (xfig can create code for the picture environment). The pstricks packages (see page ) is far more powerful.
• by any program that can produce Postscript files (for LaTeX) or JPEG, PNG andPDF (for pdflatex).

Whatever graphics you want to add, you should use the figure environment so that L^ATEX can cope sensibly with situations where, for example, you attempt to insert near the bottom of a page a graphic that's half a page high. The figure environment will float the graphic to the top or bottom of the page, or on the next page, with preferences that you can provide.

h	here
t	top of page
b	bottom of page
p	on a page with no text

Putting ! as the first argument in the square brackets will encourage L^ATEX to do what you say, even if the result's sub-optimal. See the online hints about floats in LaTeX for further details.

\begin{figure}[htbp]
   \vspace{0.5in}
   \caption{0.5 inch of space}
\end{figure}

 

Figure 1: 0.5 inch of space

It's possible to have more than one graphic in a figure. See the example later on.

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© Cambridge University Engineering Dept
Information provided by Tim Love
2006-07-27