How to write a text next to an image using minipage and figure?

Question

I want to write a text next to an image. I tried to use minipage with figure, because I want to utilize label and caption.

Here is my code:

\begin{figure}[htbp]
  \centering
  \begin{minipage}{0.5\textwidth}
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{img/Kinect image 3.png}
    \caption{\cite{Prochazka.2015}\label{fig:introduction}}
  \end{minipage}
  \begin{minipage}{0.5\textwidth}
   Here is the text.
  \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

The output is:

But the text should be next to the image on the right. How can I reach this? Thanks for helping me.

Answer 1

You should avoid spurious white space between the two minipages. It is causing the sum of horizontal dimensions to be greater than \textwidth:

0.5\textwidth + (space width) + 0.5\textwidth > \textwidth

This spurious spaces appears by the TeX syntax itself. The right syntax demands adding a comment symbol % just at the end of the line where the first minipage is.

By the way, remember that you can choose the horizontal alignment of minipage environment using its [pos] optional argument. For the alignment of graphics, it is usefull the graphbox package. It adds to \includegraphics command the [align=t,c,b] option.

For example, if you want your text to start at the top:

The [t] option in minipage aligns that environment horizontally with the current line or test (even in your document, no material yet) so you must set \begin{minipage}[t]{0.5\textwidth} in both cases.
The [align=t] option in \includegraphics, aligns the top of the image with the current line of text (which will be the first line of the right text)
.

At least, note that the \centering sentence is not necessary in this example, because there is nothing to center: you are taking up the entire width of the text.

So the complete code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx,graphbox}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[htbp]
  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.5\textwidth}
    \includegraphics[align=t,width=\textwidth]{your_image.jpg}%
    \caption{\cite{Prochazka.2015}\label{fig:}}%
  \end{minipage}%
   \begin{minipage}[t]{0.5\textwidth}
   Here is the text.
  \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

\end{document}