Place text at a defined vertical position on the side of a figure

Question

I want to insert text in a defined (= set with a number, not just "bottom", "center" or "top") vertical position at the side of a figure. I managed to insert text at the side, but I can't figure out how to set the vertical position. Ideally, I would like to add different lines of text on the same side, each one with its position.

Here's what I did:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[h]
text on the left side
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{image}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Alternatively, I can insert text and figure in a tabular, but again I don't know how to set the vertical position of the text:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\begin{document}

\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{cc}   
text on the left & \includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{image}
\end{tabular}
\end{center} 

\end{document}

Possible duplicate of How to vertically center two images next to each other? — Marco Daniel, Feb 20 '17 at 16:22
I prefer the solution provided by the package graphbox: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/350374/5239 — Marco Daniel, Feb 20 '17 at 16:23

AboAmmar · Answer 1 · 2017-02-20T17:08:39.320

You can use a normal tabular for the text on the left of the image and by specifying some distance after each newline \\ [<some v. distance>], you can control the vertical position of the text. Since pictures are normally placed above the baseline, you need to specify the [t] option from adjustbox package for the top text line to be adjusted with the top line of the image.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage[export]{adjustbox}
\begin{document}

\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}[t]{r}
  text on the left1 \\[.5cm]
  text on the left2 \\[.5cm]
  text on the left3 \\
  text on the left4 \\[.5cm]
  text on the left5 
\end{tabular}
\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth,valign=t]{image}
\end{center} 

\end{document}

Another option would be using TiKZ like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\begin{document}

\begin{center}    
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node (p) {\includegraphics[width=0.5\textwidth]{image}};
\node [left] at ($(p.north west)!.1!(p.south west)$) {text on the left1};
\node [left] at ($(p.north west)!.3!(p.south west)$) {text on the left2};
\node [left] at ($(p.north west)!.5!(p.south west)$) {text on the left3};
\node [left] at ($(p.north west)!.7!(p.south west)$) {text on the left4};
\node [left] at ($(p.north west)!.9!(p.south west)$) {text on the left5};
\end{tikzpicture}    
\end{center}

\end{document}

with a similar (or better) output:

EditPiAf · Answer 2 · 2017-02-21T11:30:41.333

Without using TikZ or the tabular environment, one can use the minipage environment to split the page in two subpages. Then, the position of the text can be set using the classical spacing and positioning commands vspace, hspace, centering, flushleft, flushright, etc. For your example, one can code

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\begin{document}

\begin{minipage}[b]{0.5\textwidth}
    \flushright
    text on the left 1

    text on the left 2

    \vspace{1em}
    text on the left 3
\end{minipage} 
\begin{minipage}{0.5\textwidth}
    \flushleft
    \includegraphics[]{image}
\end{minipage}

\end{document}

and obtain the following output:

Place text at a defined vertical position on the side of a figure

2 Answers2