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From: wolf@fb14vax.sbsvax.uucp (Wolfgang Huwig)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: LaTeX: wrapping text around figures
Message-ID: <WOLF.91Feb20172405@fb14vax.sbsvax.uucp>
Date: 20 Feb 91 16:24:05 GMT
References: <1991Feb18.145249.39052@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Sender: news@sbsvax.cs.uni-sb.de
Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, West Germany.
Lines: 52
In-reply-to: jochterski@eagle.wesleyan.edu's message of 18 Feb 91 19:52:49 GMT

In article <1991Feb18.145249.39052@eagle.wesleyan.edu> jochterski@eagle.wesleyan.edu writes:

>I have read through the manuals, and tried various things with little success.
>Is there a way to get LaTeX to wrap text around figures (esp. from PiCTeX).
>I.e.:
>
>(1)hblahblahblahblahblahblahblah
>blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah
>(2)hblahblah |------------------|    Either starting point (1) or (2) is
>blahblahblah |                  |    O.K.
>blahblahblah |                  |
>blahblahblah |     Figure       |
>blahblahblah |                  |
>blahblahblah |__________________|
>blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah
>
>I know that a similar feat may be accomplished in TeX with \parshape. Does one
>necessarily have to twiddle with LaTex's \linewidth? (LaTeX manual recommends
>not doing that...)

Some time ago I tried to write some macros for LaTeX which should do
exactly what you described above. But I soon realized that it would be
really hard to integrate such line oriented processing into LaTeX.
As Don Hosek stated in another reply to your posting it would be
very difficult to handle all circumstances in which such a floating
text paragraph can appear.
Well, last week I found some time to look at the thing again and I
added a quite restricted version based on \parshape to the picture-
including front-end macros a friend and me wrote (using epsf.tex
and dvips by Tom Rokicki). It's really not a general approach but
if one takes care it gives nices results.
If someone (esp. a TeX guru) can give some advice what should be
done to make more powerfull and well-behaving floating-text macros
or give some hints where this subject has been discussed (books,
TUGboat articles etc.), I would really appreciate it. E.g. I'm
interested in a two or three column style with floating text, like
it is often used in magazines. Is there allready such a beast?
Greetings,
 Wolfgang

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Wolfgang Huwig       CS Dept./AI Lab       University of Saarland |
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| Internet: wolf@cs.uni-sb.de | This space intentionally left blank |
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+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Wolfgang Huwig       CS Dept./AI Lab       University of Saarland |
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| Internet: wolf@cs.uni-sb.de | This space intentionally left blank |
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