Custom margin settings for figure in LaTeX

Question

I have a fairly large figure in a LaTeX document. This figure is too large for the left and right margin of the document. This results in the figure being placed flush with the left margin, and way beyond the right margin. What I want is to do, is center the figure on the page. Can I do this, e.g. by setting a different left margin for this figure?

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score 208 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 19 '11 at 13:42

208

\centerline{\includegraphics{...}}

Does this without any hspace trickery.

answered Oct 19 '11 at 13:42

davbud

2,181

13

Very clean code, and solves the need-more-width-for-my-graph problem, so worth a try! – nruth Dec 04 '11 at 02:22
6

Excellent, this solved a whole lot more for me! – dorien Jun 22 '13 at 22:31
4

Where have you been all my life. Why have I been struggling with this for years... – keyser Jan 31 '15 at 12:46
How can I do this in Lyx? – a06e May 31 '16 at 22:07
@becko ERT before the image with \centerline{, ERT after the image with }. – Sparhawk Jun 27 '17 at 06:28
But this answer works only if the image should be centered. If you just want to give a small, possibly partly transparent, image a negative margin, the accepted answer is better. – JepZ Jan 25 '19 at 11:50
1

Perfect! Exactly what I needed and is the easiest solution. It also worked on a subfigure containing two figures side-by-side. Yay! – anaotha Aug 28 '19 at 11:03
Thank you! So simple yet so powerful. – Sudharsan Madhavan Jan 05 '21 at 05:36
Made my day! :) – daruma Oct 20 '21 at 06:49

score 113 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '09 at 13:45

113

If the figure is e.g. 3 inches too wide, add a negative space of half that before the figure:

\hspace*{-1.5in}
\includegraphics{...}

answered May 13 '09 at 13:45

Jouni K. Seppänen

11,970
2
18
11

2

How can this negative space approach be used to make use of the space on the right? – Prradep Jan 12 '18 at 10:21
For me, images that are too wide automatically already penetrate the right-side margin. – user1271772 Dec 03 '18 at 23:16

score 23 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 15 '09 at 01:37

23

The above did not work for me as I wanted the figure wider than the caption. Also, I think there is a override by the endfloat package.

This will leave the entire document intact and only alter the figure:

\begin{figure}
    \advance\leftskip-4cm
    \includegraphics[options]{location}
\end{figure}

You could also use:

\advance\rightskip-2cm

answered Jun 15 '09 at 01:37

1

Your code snippet worked just fine, thank you for the insight ! The hspace command above didn't work in my case. – Jun 21 '10 at 20:21
This worked well for me in the case of multiple horizontally distributed \includegraphics in the same figure :) – JorgeGT Mar 08 '16 at 13:27

score 16 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 17 '14 at 20:49

16

If the figure is an external graphics, then do like this:

\begin{figure}
  \begin{center}
   \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{...}
  \end{center}
\end{figure}

\textwidth will stretch it to full text width. You can specify a coefficient like, for example, 0.75 of the text width:

\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{...}

edited Jan 17 '14 at 20:49

azetina

28,884

answered May 13 '09 at 12:27

jbasko

261
1
3

score 12 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 23 '10 at 05:49

Found a great simple solution to this problem!

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\textwidth]{%
\includegraphics[width=1.4\textwidth]{mypic}}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

I found this solution here: http://texblog.net/latex-archive/layout/centering-figure-table/#comment-875

score 6 · Answer 6 · edited May 31 '12 at 17:07

6

If you are using the memoir class, the solution is to use

\centerfloat

rather than

\centering

in your float. This will prevent you from having to manually set the negative horizontal spacing.

Maybe you're not using memoir. Fair enough. \centerfloat is defined thusly, so you can just make your own:

\newcommand*{\centerfloat}{%
  \parindent \z@
  \leftskip \z@ \@plus 1fil \@minus \textwidth
  \rightskip\leftskip
  \parfillskip \z@skip}

edited May 31 '12 at 17:07

Claudio Fiandrino

63,575

answered Jun 25 '11 at 18:21

Nate R.

61

\centerfloat works great in memoir class – entropy Mar 21 '13 at 12:02

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Aug 04 '11 at 09:52

The automated version of Ian's answer might look like this:

\newlength{\myimageoversize}
\newsavebox{\myimage}
\newcommand{\mycenter}[1]{%
\savebox{\myimage}{#1}
\settowidth{\myimageoversize}{\usebox{\myimage}}
\addtolength{\myimageoversize}{-\textwidth}
\setlength{\leftskip}{-0.5\myimageoversize}
\noindent
\usebox{\myimage}}

\begin{figure}
\mycenter{\includegraphics{...}}
\end{figure}

Custom margin settings for figure in LaTeX

7 Answers7

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