I want to create something like a leaflet/magazine using Latex. Is it possible to place text on top of an image and style the text freely?
Any links to examples of something like this?
I usually do something like
\usepackage{tikz}
...
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (0, 0) node[inner sep=0] {\includegraphics[width=4cm]{imagefile.png}};
\draw (1, 1) node {Hello world};
\end{tikzpicture}
A very good toolset for manipulating images is pgf/TikZ pdf doc.
See \pgfimage for examples. It allows to mix text and image freely. There are many ways to do it. One of them is to use layers (p. 220 of pgfmanual). The pgf manual contains many simple examples, and is very precise.
Another solution is to use the lpic package: the homepage contains some examples.
You can find other examples for pfg and TikZ here and here for many impressive examples.
You can also define the text after the image and then offset it using negative vertical space. Because it follows after the image in the LaTeX source, it will be drawn on top of the image instead of underneath it.
\includegraphics[...]{...}
\vspace*{-20ex} % Tune this to the image height.
\begin{center}
Text
\end{center}
\vspace*{20ex} % The spacing above but without the minus.
Another solution is the textpos package which allows you to specify boxes at absolute positions on the page. The boxes can overlap, so you can put the figure in one box, and text in another box on top of it.
I realise that the question is old and answer is accepted, but for completeness would like to propose an alternative approach for making leaflets in LaTeX.
Specifically, the leaflet document style served me really well for this purpose.
A good blog post wrt background image can be found here. There are a couple of packages that are required to use in order to make the proposed approach work, but were not mentioned in the blog post:
\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage{transparent}
As already suggested, you can annotate the different parts of the figure using TikZ. However, sometimes it might even better to use numbers to reference the different parts and explain them in the figure caption.
To easily get the precise relative positions (which is often tedious) and to generate LaTeX code automatically, you could use the new web-based LaTeX Overlay Generator, which I built for such cases. This is just a small interactive tool, which helps you to find the right locations.
Another way to do this, admittedly not using LaTeX, would simply be to edit the image with photoshop or gimp or something like that. I guess your option in terms of typesetting mathematics might be fairly limited doing it this way.
Otherwise I'd endorse using tikz.
Are you sure you want to do it in LaTeX? Desktop publishing software might be more suited to your needs... Something like scribus might be easier than tikz in terms of learning curve, depending on what you want to do.
I'd like to add on to #midtiby's answer...
You can also specify the text position using a relative position, like so:
\usepackage{tikz}
...
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[inner sep=0] (image) at (0,0) {\includegraphics[width=4cm]{imagefile.png}};
\node[above=0 of image] {Hello world};
\end{tikzpicture}
Related
I'm making a poster (sort of) and would like to do these things, but I'm not sure if AsciiDoc or AsciiDoctor can do them, and if so, how:
Background image that can be stretched to the poster's dimensions
A rectangle with some transparency and a border, basically a bright frame, with text in it.
An image with text in it.
Text inside an image inside a rectangle.
(Bonus question: Is it possible to free-form specify where something goes, e.g. x=80%, y = 20% for something in the top right corner?)
I'm not sure that it makes sense to use AsciiDoc to source poster output, as opposed to a desktop publishing tool or a graphics program.
But if you are converting to HTML, you should be able to accomplish most of this with clever sourcing and some CSS/JavaScript on the front end. That is, you can source some of the metadata you want to impose on the final image, then have front-end code do the manipulation and imposition. For instance, you can provide a caption, classes, a title, and other info in the source, but AsciiDoc is intentionally agnostic about how that stuff is handled in output.
However, unless you need to create these things as part of technical documents, especially ones getting built/generated recuringly with automation, you're likely better off with a specialized tool.
Say I have a range – something like a 400x400 rectangle at 60, 60 – which is dynamically generated by a separate program. I'm wondering how it's possible to crop my document to that range in the command line?
Everything I've read has suggested I'd need to add a rectangle to the document, resize the document to that rectangle (resize to selection), and then remove the rectangle.
But I'm having trouble with adding and removing that rectangle. I found the ToolRect verb, but I can't seem to find anything related to actually drawing that rectangle (or removing it).
So, am I doing this wrong or is there just no way to add (and select) the rectangle using only the command line? Using another program is also fine, but I haven't had much luck with that (I couldn't get the python modules installed for the only possibly helpful thing I found..).
In this email discussion from 2012, someone said:
There is no way to pass parameters to verbs (with the current
implementation, they don't take parameters by design).
In case they add this capability later, the required verbs to crop the page would be:
EditSelectAll
SelectionGroup
ToolRect (requires parameters, i.e. where to crop)
EditSelectAll
ObjectSetClipPath
FitCanvasToDrawing
FileVacuum
FileSaveAs (requires a parameter, so that we don't have to overwrite the original)
Since Inkscape can edit any valid SVG, I'd rather look into other available SVG libraries, like this one for Python.
If you are OK with rasterising your image, take a look at this question. Inkscape unfortunately ignores the --export-area option when exporting to svg or pdf.
My – admittedly, unsatisfying – solution was to create a separate program to add a viewbox to the SVG text.
The program I made was implemented into a separate part of my project, so I don't have a good command line version, but if you plan on making one yourself, whatever XML editing library you have for your language of choice should be all you need. I used xmldom for Node.js with relative ease.
I'm trying to text-wrap floating images in LaTeX, using code like the following:
\begin{wrapfigure}{R}{0.5\textwidth}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics{images/image.png}
\caption{This is the caption.}
}
\label{fig:image1}
\end{center}
\end{wrapfigure
This works fine most of the time (creating an image that floats on the right-hand side), but sometimes LaTeX does not properly clear after the image, and it leaves an open column for another page or two. How does one remedy this, or ideally, does LaTeX have a function similar to clear: both in CSS?
There is the \clearpage command, but it's not appropriate when there's no natural place to break to a new page near the image.
You might try to manually set the height of the figure using the optional argument of wrapfigure
\begin{wrapfigure}[lineheight]{alignment}{width}
where lineheight is the number of text lines which shall wrap around the image.
I still don't have a good answer to this question, but the solution for now is to not use wrapfigure at all. Using only figure solves the problem of open columns, but it's not the most ideal solution. Any other answers are still welcome, but I'll post my half-way solution here for those who might also need it:
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics{images/image.png}
\caption{This is the caption.}
\end{center}
\label{fig:image1}
\end{figure}
My code is simple enough, and importing eps images is something I've done before with other matlab-generated content, but for one reason or another I end up with blurred colors in my heatmap when I use epsfig or graphicx to import it into my document. In the picture below, the right is what shows up if I compile to DVI and open up the document in Yap, and the left is if I simply view the eps in GSView.
alt text http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/1694/epsproblem.png
Here is my code. This example is using graphicx, but the idea is the same with epsfig.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/ngram3_model_raw.eps}
\caption{The perplexity when compared
against the HUB test set}
\end{figure}
Is there perhaps some option I am forgetting?
I had the same problem with DVI, but if I compiled to pdf the pictures were fine
What you see is bilinear interpolation. It is done by the viewer. Probably Matlab defines the plot contents as a pixmap (I guess you use imagesc?).
The solution is not straightforward. It may help to use a different processing chain (as WtFudgE pointed out) that will lead the data end up in a format where it is not interpolated anymore. You may also use a different viewer that does not interpolate and I would assume that a printer would also not interpolate. This can again be dependent of the application you print from.
Sorry that I don't have a solution for you; at least you now have some new words to search for in Google. ;)
I don't know anything about either library but I have to choose one of them.
Which one whould you recommend?
I'm using Perl. I need to generate images for weather site. The image is generated for a location and should contain temperature and a weather condition image inside. I guess this is a piece of cake for both libs. But I want to know which one is more powerful. I've read that libGD is not able to rotate text. Maybe there are some other drawbacks? Which one generates images faster? Whose API is easier to use?
according to this source, you should use GD:
GD and other modules built on top of that (like GD::Graph) are more aimed at producing "new" images like charts.
And you can read "Develop your own weather maps and alerts with Perl and GD", which is what you're looking for.
If you some some time. try them both, play a little, and decide.
I find both to be straightforward to use ImageMagick gives you a lot more power than gd. Here are two Magick examples from my posts:
How can I use IO::Scalar with Image::Magick::Read()
How can I resize an image to fit area with Image::Magick?
to give you examples of the API.
I have used GD to create a visualization.
See Script : giss-timeline-graphs.pl on that page.
imagemagick is more robust, however libGD should be able to cover most of the image generation tasks as well. you should see perl API/functions to both of these libraries to see what is more convenient for you.