On 20.05.08, Marwan Boustany wrote:
> On Tue, 20 May 2008 00:49:45 +0100, Steve Litt wrote:
>> On Monday 19 May 2008 12:51, Marwan Boustany wrote:
>>> Is it necessary to force [e]very float to be 'here definitely' if I
>>> actually want it to be correctly placed in the text?
* If you want it exactly at the position where you have it in the input
text (i.e. a non-floating float), yes.
As the float will be put as one nonbreakable unit, there will be lots
of vertical whitespace before or after in many cases.
* If you want it at a "correct" position but not necessarily exact where
it is, no.
> As it happens the graphics are large, taking up, lengthwise about 40% of
> the page.
This is a very important part of information (as well as the number of
floats in the document).
We also need to know, whether your thesis layout should
a) normally place floats at the top or bottom of a page
b) always place floats at the top or bottom of a page
c) preferabely puts floats between the text
d) always puts floats between the text
In case of d), using the global toggle "here definitely" in LyX helps.
LaTeX has it's own idea about the correct position of a float, but there
are a lot of parameters to customise this.
Float placement in LaTeX is not *pathetic* but *complex*! Consulting a
LaTeX guide (or local expert) about this topic is recommended.
The counters topnumber and bottomnumber determine how many floats are
allowed on one page and the commands \topfraction, \bottomfraction and
\textfraction determine how much space they might take.
Change with e.g. \setcounter{topnumber}{4}
or \renewcommand{textfraction}{0.1} in the LaTeX preamble.
Günter
