Any way to _absolutely_ dictate image locations?

Question

I've used LaTeX to author something approaching 100 scientific papers, and while I love the equation rendering and the ease of referencing, I dislike in almost equal measure the inability to dictate image locations.

My papers are often (a) short and (b) full of figures. I usually know where I want those images to go, e.g. Fig 1 at the bottom of page 1, etc. I would like to specify this to LaTeX have have the system obey me absolutely, rather than taking my placement instructions as suggestions. I would like LaTeX to wall off the regions I specify, such as the bottom of page 1, and then do its best to flow the text and equation layout around those absolute, non-negotiable constraints.

Many hours of googling has failed to uncover a means to do this; instead I find lots of tricks for increasing how emphatic my "suggestion" is to LaTeX by, say, putting [h] or [h!], or even altering LaTeX's parameters for how important its various layout desiderata are (tolerances of overflow, space around figures etc.). While better than useless, these solutions fall far short of the "do as you are told" imperative I'm seeking. Is it possible?

Answer 1

[h] (and [!h]) is essentially a syntax error that requests all figures go to the end of the document latex usually gives a warning and changes that to [ht] to give itself a chance. You may prefer to not use a float at all and just use capt-of package so you can just include the figure and then do \captionof{figure}{zzzz}

Stopping floats though puts floats exactly where you put them in the text stream whereas (I think) you want to put them where you want on the page. This isn't really supported in latex unless you re-write half of it, which is what the LaTeX3 xor package aims to do, and does (or has had in some of its incarnations over the years (it pre-dates LaTeX2e in parts) the ability to specify that floats go in specific regions eg top float on page 6 or margin float on page 2. However xor isn't really usable for real documents at present it is more of an experimental testbed than something you can use today.

However all is not lost, but you need to give LaTeX a chance. Don't use h for a start if you want figures to go in areas such as "bottom of page 1" as the main effect of [h] is to prevent the float being placed in any of the normal float areas as it means not-top, not-bottom and not-float-page.

If you put a figure in the text so it falls on page 1 and use [!b] then it will go on the bottom of that page unless it doesn't fit (or unless you put some other big unbreakable thing like a large table) on the same page.

Answer 2

The biggest trick is that you don't have to use floats at all! They are, in many cases, not the right tool for the job. In fact, I'd say most of the time they are the wrong tool, at least with the default settings. Not everyone agrees with me, of course (See the comments here). Then once you place it, it will stay with that bit of text. It isn't perfect, as it stays with text, not position, but if you've finalized that document mostly you can just stick it with text near the position you want. I've done things that way, though they are a bit of a pain.

If you want an image just toss in

\includegraphics[scale=1]{foo}

or whatever at the point you want it.

You can use the caption package to add captions:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[]{caption}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
Hi! I'm a test

\noindent\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{test}
\captionof{figure}{An example}
\end{minipage}
\vspace{0.2 \baselineskip} %I find this makes the figure stand out more nicely. 


ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
\end{document}

You'll need a test.png or something like that to make this work, but you can see it is quite simple. You can also do the same thing for tables. Then they don't move on you at all.

Other useful things I've heard about: \FloatBarrier (from the placeins package), which creates a line which all floats much appear before. I've never used it, but its been recommended to me. This again locks based on text, but you can move it as needed, as above, if H and such aren't working for you, as they never seem to do for me.

When I was writing my thesis I found adding

%Make latex put figures with text more
\renewcommand{\topfraction}{0.9}
\renewcommand{\textfraction}{0.05}

To my preamble made floats suck a lot less. They still moved, but wouldn't all move to blank pages when I wanted to add a few large figures to the document; they'd mostly stay where they should, with just some tweaking required. This made them more likely to stay roughly where I wanted them.