#775 Playing with a minipage based alternative way to include figures in pdf gnuplot manual.

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

Hi,

I have been recently looking at some old reports about picins use in gnuplot manual and its possible replacement by wrapfig (old https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/bugs/655/). While starting from above provided patch I improved it to have better top and bottom margins, wrapfig was still clearly worse than picins. Also tried some other alternatives, but none of them worked well enough.

I myself have been using picins for a long time in some of my documents and I like it very much, but I am starting to use paired minipages for some cases where I previously used picins. So I wondered how hard would be to implement something like that for the pdf version of gnuplot manual, and I wrote something that could be useful for more general use.

This relies on char after 'F' control character, using < and > as additional control chars if present, traditional picins being used otherwise. An example would look like

F<
text to go in left side minipage
F>figure_basename

Some manual tweak is needed to place the commands, but that should result in two paired minipages, left one with the enclosed text and right one with the figure, both currently top aligned.

Two patches are attached,

• 5000_doc2tex.c_Add-figures-with-minipage.diff: modifies doc2tex.c to support this method.
• 5001_gnuplot.doc_use-minipage.diff: modifies gnuplot.doc to use this system in a number of figures, leaving some others unchanged, so some of the figures use the minipage way and some others keep using picins.

Here you have the code, in case you consider it useful. Since I already wrote it, I think is a pity not to share it.

Thanks for your work on gnuplot.

Regards

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

Played a bit more on this and implemented optional bottom or center alignment of the minipages

F<b
F<c

Anything else (or nothing) following F< will result in top alignment.

In case someone finds them useful I am attaching a couple of patches to be applied on top of the previous ones, one with additional changes in the doc2tex.c C code and the other with additional changes to gnuplot.doc to test these extra things.

Regards,

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

Seems attachments were missing. They should go here

[Agustin Martin Domingo]

5104_gnuplot.doc_Use-minipage-alignement.diff contained some extra stuff. Resending it cleaner. Sorry for the noise.