[vox-tech] latex: flowing around text

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 07:56:45AM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> occasionally i'll find a google groups link that's so useful that it'll
> come up again and again in my searches.  i happen to know that we have a
> few more latex users here than we did a couple of years ago, so i'm
> posting this in hopes that it'll be as useful to other people as it has
> been for me.  this is a truly wonderful post:
> 
> http://www.google.com/groups?q=flow+around+text+group:comp.text.tex&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=3unt1u%24i3r%40krant.cs.ruu.nl&rnum=1
> 
> the guy compares and contrasts different ways of getting text to flow
> around floats.
> 
> the reason why this is so noteworthy is:
> 
> 1. the topic is not mentioned in the lamport book.
> 
> 2. the topic is covered in the companion book, but the information is so
>    old that it's wrong.  for example, my hat is off to anybody who
>    actually gets parpic to work well...
> 
> 
> fwiw, i've found that picins is the best solution for wrapping text
> around a float.  here is an example of picins in use:
> 
>    \usepackage{epic,eepic,picins}
> 
>    \parpic{%

<snip>

> works very well.  a couple of notes:

Thanks, Pete. Wasn't aware of these packages (although so far I use
plain TeX more often than LaTeX.

> 1. the "%" characters are comment characters.  they help avoid
>    extraneous newlines.

You won't need the %s if you are in vertical mode; \par (and ^^M^^M)
is ignored in vertical mode. And since \usepackage{...} is followed by
a line break, any paragraph will be ended at this point, and we'll be
in virtical mode.

<snip>

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah@cowan.name