How to force two figures to stay on the same page in LaTeX?

Question

I have two images that I want to display on a page as figures. Each eats up little less than half of the space available so there's not much room for any other stuff on that page, but I know there is enough space for both of the figures. I tried to place the figures with [ht] and [hb], both [h] and both [ht] but still I can't get those two images on the same page but instead at least few paragraphs between them.

How do I force those two figures to stay on the same page?

Answer 1

Try adding a !, e.g. [h!].

Answer 2

try [h!] first but else you can do it the ugly way.

LateX is a bit hard in placing images with such constraints as it manages placing itself. What I usually do if I want a figure right in that spot is do something like|:

text in front of image here

 \newpage 
 \figure1 
 \figure2

text after images here

I know it may not be the correct way to do it but it works like a charm :).

//edit

You can do the same if you want a little text at top of the page but then just use /clearpage. Of course you can also scale them a bit smaller so it does not happen anymore. Maybe the non-seen whitespace is a bit larger than you suspect, I always try to scale down my image until they do appear on the same page, just to know for sure there is not like 1% overlap only making all of this not needed.

Answer 3

If you want them both on the same page and they'll both take up basically the whole page, then the best idea is to tell LaTeX to put them both on a page of their own!

\begin{figure}[p]

It would probably be against sound typographic principles (e.g., ugly) to have two figures on a page with only a few lines of text above or below them.

---

By the way, the reason that [!h] works is because it's telling LaTeX to override its usual restrictions on how much space should be devoted to floats on a page with text. As implied above, there's a reason the restrictions are there. Which isn't to say they can be loosened somewhat; see the FAQ on doing that.

Answer 4

You can put two figures inside one figure environment. For example:

\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics{fig1}
\caption{Caption 1}
\includegraphics{fig2}
\caption{Caption 2}
\end{figure}

Each caption will generate a separate figure number.

Answer 5

If you want to have images about same topic, you ca use subfigure package and construction:

\begin{figure}
 \subfigure[first image]{\includegraphics{image}\label{first}}
 \subfigure[second image]{\includegraphics{image}\label{second}}
 \caption{main caption}\label{main_label}
\end{figure}

If you want to have, for example two, different images next to each other you can use:

\begin{figure}
 \begin{minipage}{.5\textwidth}
  \includegraphics{image}
  \caption{first}
 \end{minipage}
 \begin{minipage}{.5\textwidth}
  \includegraphics{image}
  \caption{second}
 \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

For images in columns you will have [1] [2] [3] [4] in the source, but it will look like

[1] [3]

[2] [4].