latex - Adding Figures in Latex - Embed an Image/picture - latex tutorial
How to Add Figures in Latex?
- It is necessary to add pictures to your documents.
- Using LaTeX all pictures will be indexed automatically and tagged with successive numbers when using the figure environment and the graphicx package.
Sample Code:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{boat.jpg}
\caption{A boat.}
\label{fig:boat1}
\end{figure}
Figure \ref{fig:boat1} shows a boat.
\end{document}
This code will create the following pdf:
learn latex tutorial - output of adding figures in latex - latex example
- The figure environment takes care of the numbering and positioning of the image within the document.
- In order to include a figure, you must use the \includegraphics command.
- It takes the image width as an option in brackets and the path to your image file.
- If you \linewidth is mentioned into the brackets, which means the picture will be scaled to fit the width of the document.
- As a result the smaller pictures are upscaled and larger pictures are downscaled respectively.
- In this case the image is stored in the same directory as my .tex file, so I simply put boat.jpg here to include it.
- For large documents, you want to store image files in a different folder, say we created a folder images, then we would simply write images/boat.jpg into the braces.
- In the next command we set a \caption, which is the text shown below the image and a \label which is invisible, but useful if we want to refer to our figure in our document.
- You can use the \ref command to refer to the figure (marked by label) in your text and it will then be replaced by the correct number.
- LaTeX is smart enough to retrieve the correct numbers for all your images automatically.
- Note that you will need to include the graphicx package in order to use this code.
Force the picture to a certain position - Set the float:
- You will notice that the figure doesn't necessarily show up in the exact place as you put your code in the .tex file.
- If your document contains a lot of text, it's possible that LaTeX will put the picture on the next page, or any other page where it finds sufficient space.
- To prevent this behavior, it's necessary to set the float value for the figure environment.
%...
\begin{figure}[h!]
%...
- Setting the float by adding [h!] behind the figure environment \begin tag will force the figure to be shown at the location in the document. Possible values are:
- h (here) - same location
- t (top) - top of page
- b (bottom) - bottom of page
- p (page) - on an extra page
- ! (override) - will force the specified location
- However, I have only used the [h!] option so far. The float package (\usepackage{float}) allows to set the option to [H], which is even stricter than [h!].