Landscape Mode & Art
Stephen Tiano
... it is not possible to make insertions in "landscape mode" ...
So what do we do about tables that just don't fit the page width? I
mean, science journals are littered with landscaped tables.
And I understand everything I've read so far to say that placing art is
difficult and erratic at best, but surely it's done with great
regularity,
too, no? Math, science, engineering pubs simply have to be able to have
art placed in any number of ways. Or is this just stuff that's left for
some other system than TeX or LaTeX for typesetting?
Scott Pakin
>
> According to pg. 8 of "Gentle Intro":
>
> ... it is not possible to make insertions in "landscape mode" ...
>
> So what do we do about tables that just don't fit the page width? I
> mean, science journals are littered with landscaped tables.
The quote you're referring to is a little misleading. What it's
saying is that TeX proper doesn't know anything about figures or
landscape mode. But what TeX can do is defer to the backend
processor (e.g., dvips), telling *it* to deal with figures,
landscape mode, etc., by means of the \special command.
In LaTeX, the "rotating" package defines commands for adding
rotated figures and tables to a document. rotating tells TeX
to allocate space for the rotated figure. It then inserts the
appropriate \special command -- which TeX ignores -- to tell
dvips, pdftex, dvipdfm, or whatever to include and rotate the
figure.
-- Scott
Elmar Wosnitza
> By rotating "package", do you mean a separate add-on or extension to
> LaTeX? Or is that something that's part of AMS-LaTeX, or even, say,
> Oz-Tex?
>
Let's get this right:
* The typesetting system is TeX.
* There are implementations of TeX on various machine types:
- OzTeX, CMacTeX, TeXtures on Mac,
- mikTeX (and others) on PCs,
- teTeX on Linux...
* LaTeX, ConTeXt, AMS-TeX are collections of Macros for TeX,
thus rather doing the job of the designer, telling the
typesetter what to do (but not how to do it).
* rotating.sty, supertabular.sty, graphicx.sty ...
are packages for LaTeX, adding on tons of features,
if you look in the right places, you find packages
for almost everything.
Elmar
BTW: people do not like fullquotes too much here ;-)
--
- Dieses Schreiben wurde nach der neuen Rechtschreibung
- erstellt und ist daher (auch) ohne Unterschrift gültig.
--
Stephen Tiano
not the whole stream. Is that okay, or should I try to pare it down more.
Thing is, as a production person--but a former coy editor and
proofreader--I'm loathe to touch other people's words except for design
and layout.
I certainly don't mean to clog up people's bandwidth and mailboxes
unnecessarily. Should I j=knock off the quoting altogether?
Steve Tiano
Robin Fairbairns
>According to pg. 8 of "Gentle Intro":
>
> ... it is not possible to make insertions in "landscape mode" ...
>
>So what do we do about tables that just don't fit the page width? I
>mean, science journals are littered with landscaped tables.
i take it you want to use plain tex?
given that, it's probably fairly easy to translate the techniques of
rotating.sty (mentioned by someone else) into the plain world. this
is easiest done by using the plain tex graphics package (ctan
macros/plain/graphics), which simply didn't exist at the time the
gentle intro was written.
>And I understand everything I've read so far to say that placing art is
>difficult and erratic at best, but surely it's done with great
>regularity, too, no?
it can be tricky, but (if one's using latex -- i've *never* explicitly
used insertions in plain tex) a little calm thought and consideration
of the rules and parameters will get the right answer pretty quickly.
>Math, science, engineering pubs simply have to be able to have
>art placed in any number of ways. Or is this just stuff that's left for
>some other system than TeX or LaTeX for typesetting?
if you're using latex, it's all a doddle (since the code has already
been written for you). modulo needing to think clearly and carefully.
there _are_ things that are better done by something other than tex/
latex, but mostly, it serves its purpose pretty well, imo.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge