Remove space after figure and before text

Question

I have a figure in my paper (I am using IEEEtran package). After this figure there exists a space between the figure and the text. How can I reduce the size of this white space. To be specific the space is between the caption of the figure and the text of my paper. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This depends on the location of the float - if the float is at the top of the page, the gap between the caption and the text is \textfloatsep, while the gap for a float in the middle of the page is given by \intextsep.

From the layouts package documentation it is possible to see the lengths in terms of page/document float elements (p 21 onward):

Default for ieeetran are

• \textfloatsep: 1.7\baselineskip plus 0.2\baselineskip minus 0.5\baselineskip
• \intextsep: \baselineskip plus 0.2\baselineskip minus 0.2\baselineskip

and therefore depends on the choice of the default font (since that sets \baselineskip). The default pt-form is therefore

• \textfloatsep: 20.4pt plus 2.4pt minus 4.8pt
• \intextsep: 12.0pt plus 2.4pt minus 2.4pt

in the 10pt font size. The above includes some stretch/shrink. You can modify them using \setlength. For example,

\setlength{\textfloatsep}{\baselineskip plus 0.2\baselineskip minus 0.2\baselineskip}

would allow for between (roughly) 10pt and 15pt gap between the float and the text. Something like

\setlength{\textfloatsep}{5pt}

would fix the distance to 5pt (without stretch/shrink).

Answer 2

If you do not want to modify the standard template and just want a quick fix for this, you may add the following command to your document preamble:

\newcommand{\squeezeup}{\vspace{-2.5mm}}

Then, you can use the command \squeezeup throughout your document for reducing the free space after/before figures, formulas, etc., as appropriate.