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 needed.

Answer 3

Werner's answer is obviously a good one. However, I encountered a gotcha.

Using a setting like he suggested:

\setlength{\textfloatsep}{\baselineskip plus 0.2\baselineskip minus 0.5\baselineskip}

produced a cryptic error:

Package calc Error: 'p' invalid at this point...0.2\baselineskip minus 0.5\baselineskip}

After some playing around, I found out that it stumbles over the plus ... minus construction in combination with the \baseline command. What works is to multiply the lone \baseline by 1:

\setlength{\textfloatsep}{1\baselineskip plus 0.2\baselineskip minus 0.5\baselineskip}

Using lengths like 5pt instead of the baseline command is unproblematic.

Answer 4

You can use etoolbox package. Just set a \vskip with a negative value at the start (\BeforeBeginEnvironment or \AtBeginEnvironment) and at the end (\AfterEndEnvironment) of the environment figure.

MWE:

\documentclass{IEEEtran}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\usepackage{etoolbox}

\BeforeBeginEnvironment{figure}{\vskip-2ex}
\AfterEndEnvironment{figure}{\vskip-1ex}

\begin{document}

  \lipsum[1]

  \begin{figure}[h]
    \includegraphics{your_figure}
    \caption{text}
  \end{figure}

  \lipsum[1]

\end{document}

Answer 5

Try this code, you can use \vspace{-10mm} in the figure code:

\begin{figure} 
    \centering
    \subfloat[\label{fig_2a}]{%
        \includegraphics[width=0.45\linewidth]{Figures/Coss.eps}}
    \hfill
    \subfloat[\label{fig_2b}]{%
        \includegraphics[width=0.45\linewidth]{Figures/Energy.pdf}}
    \\
    \caption{Nonlinear output capacitance characteristics of the MOSFETs  } \label{fig_2}
    \vspace{-10mm}%Put here to reduce too much white space after your table 
\end{figure}