dealing with large figures in Latex

Question

I have a large figure that appears at the end of my document rather than in the section that I want to be in. Even \begin{figure}[h] doesn't help. Without scaling it down, how can I put it at the end of the section I want it in?

Answer 1

i forget if it's the float or array package that provides this, but,

\begin{figure}[H]
...
\end{figure}

The upper case H will put the figure exactly where it is in your code.

Answer 2

Here is a small tutorial for float placement. The thing you want to do is put an \afterpage{clearpage} command at the end of the section. This will create an additional page after the current one and place the floats that are left in the queque there. If the float still doesn't get placed, you have to resize it. If you really don't want to resize it and it should fit on the page, then you could try changing the margins and text area temporarily (i.e. just for that one page) and see if that lets the float get placed.

Answer 3

Using the afterpage package can be a good solution. However, using the option here you are trying to tell LaTeX where you want to put the image. Instead, you need to tell LaTeX where the image is good to be put:

• use \begin{figure}[tb] for figures that fit well in a page with text (say, half of the text height for the figure and the other half for the text)
• use \begin{figure}[p] for floats large enough to require a dedicated page.

Setting a proper option increase your chances to have the image almost where you want, having at the same time a good page layout.

If the figure is still too far from the page where it should be placed, you can set some "barriers" for floats positioning with the packages placeins or afterpage (already mentioned).