[texhax] Dense textbook with small diagrams

[Steve Schwartz]

For what it's worth:

On Sat, 2007-10-20 at 06:09 +0100, Andy Farnell wrote:
> 1) Very dense layout with inset figures and text flowing around it

I use picins often instead of wrapfig. Picins works within list
environments, for example, though not perfectly (I can supply my
previous postings on the subject). The author of picins is not traceable
(I've tried hard).

> 2) Advanced tips for moving floats around

This is mostly an FAQ and google exercise to adjust the various
textfractions, etc. for your purpose. But I'll take the opportunity to
ask if there are any plans by anyone to make the multicolumn package
work with floats. That would be very nice, though even without being a
package-writer and knowing nothing about tex output routines (other than
that they exist) I can see the mess that might be involved.

> 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)

I use pdfcrop, which I've found to be an excellent command-line utility
that almost always gives me the tighest possible bounding box. If you
can generate the figures directly as pdf's, do so and pdfcrop them.
Otherwise, use epstopdf to turn them into pdfs, which often yields a
pretty good bounding box anyway, and pdf-crop them. Then, of course, use
pdflatex.

Steve

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