Centering a pair of overfull PDFs

Question

I'm trying to get to the bottom of how to position and center things.

Here I've placed two very large PDFs side-by-side. I scaled them down to the current size and tried to center them:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in,showframe]{geometry}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{document}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\centering
\begin{figure}
%
\centering
  \begin{minipage}[c][1\totalheight][t]{0.45\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
      {\includegraphics[scale=0.085]{diagrams/pdf/square.pdf}} 
    \end{center}
  \caption{I sit hard up against the left margin}
  \end{minipage}\hfill{}%
%
  \begin{minipage}[c][1\totalheight][t]{0.45\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
    {\includegraphics[scale=0.085]{diagrams/pdf/square.pdf}}
    \end{center}
  \caption{I hang over the edge of the right margin}
  \end{minipage}\hfill{}%
%
\end{figure}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{document}

It kind of works, but it only hangs over the right margin, so it's not truly centered. If I scale them down even further, there's a point where it's no longer a problem, but say it's impractical to make them any smaller than 0.085%, and you just want it to look more like this:

Notice how the page is perfectly symmetrical, with respect to the positions of the two figures and the excess is distributed evenly between the margins?

How can I achieve this? I thought my use of minipage would sort this out, but I guess not.

Answer 1

Here is a way with the usage of this answer.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in,showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{document}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\centering
\begin{figure}
%
\hspace{-0.025\textwidth}\makebox[1.05\textwidth][c]{
\noindent\begin{minipage}[t,outer sep=0]{0.45\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
      {\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{example-image-a}} 
    \end{center}
  \caption{I sit hard up against the left margin}
  \end{minipage}\hfill%
%
  \begin{minipage}[t,outer sep=0]{0.45\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
    {\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{example-image-b}}
    \end{center}
  \caption{I hang over the edge of the right margin}
  \end{minipage}}%
%
\end{figure}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{document}

output:

PS1: If \makebox command creates a box of 1.05\textwidth the 0.05\textwidth will be added after the text width ... So reduce it by half with \hspace{-0.025\textwidth}

PS2: use the appropriate width for the minipages, but take care of the outer sep in case you will use the whole width of the \makebox command.

Edit: Better way:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in,showframe]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{document}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\centering
\begin{figure}
%
\noindent\makebox[\textwidth][c]{
\noindent\begin{minipage}[t,outer sep=0]{0.525\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
      {\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{example-image-a}} 
    \end{center}
  \caption{I sit hard up against the left margin}
  \end{minipage}\hspace{0.5cm}%
%
  \begin{minipage}[t,outer sep=0]{0.525\textwidth}%
    \begin{center}
    {\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{example-image-b}}
    \end{center}
  \caption{I hang over the edge of the right margin}
  \end{minipage}}%
%
\end{figure}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{document}