[texhax] Dense textbook with small diagrams

[Andy Farnell]

Greetings TeXperts,

Been lurking here for a while and very grateful for all the wisdom and
discussion. First post, so a brief intro:

I am writing a textbook on a technical subject and am now almost 1 year into
the project. I have learned an awful lot about LaTeX in this time and still
feel I've only scratched the surface of this enormous subject. Normally I like
to work things out for myself and *learn*, but lately I've been hitting a few
problems that seem beyond me and could really do with a bit of guidance.

The text is on signal processing and it contains a lot of small diagrams. Some
are very small indeed, which I actualy include inline mixed into the text. Others
occupy 2 or three lines and are about 1/4 pagewidth. So this is not a typical
book layout where floats are broken away from pararaphs and centered, there would
simply be to much whitespace this way. What I am aiming for is more like a single
column magazine style.

I have employed a number of techniques such as wrapfig and sidecap, tweaked
the whitespace around captions, used the caption package to get more compact
layouts and so forth.

So, rather than enumerate all the little annoying problems here may I ask
a few more general questions: 

What suggestions or pointers to example code might you share for 

1) Very dense layout with inset figures and text flowing around it
2) Advanced tips for moving floats around 
3) Any postscript tips/utils for brutally cropping .eps files (sorry this
isn't strictly a TeX question but I'm sure many here understand this issue)

Many thanks and good wishes to all,

Andy Farnell

-- 
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