How to leave space on the side of a page for figures

Question

I have noticed that a lot of technical books leave room for figures on the left side of the page. The text is on the right, and it is restricted to not take up the entire page width so that there is room for the figures. I like this layout, and would like to use it in my LaTeX documents.

Does anyone know how to format a document like this? For my purposes, I think leaving 0.75\textwidth for text and the other 0.25\textwidth for pictures would work fine. I tried to achieve something similar using the wrapfigure environment, but I think it would look better if it just had a designated space for pictures (if possible). When I use wrapfigure it messes up the alignment of the section headings and text.

@cmhughes I looked at it, and it made no sense. At all. I was hoping there would be a way to change the amsart document that I already have set up, instead of using a new \documentclass that requires completely different commands. Thanks for your input, though. — Randy Randerson, Aug 04 '13 at 16:53

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 04 '13 at 20:24

The tufte classes were designed for this purpose (amongst others), so you could give them a try. However, as I see from the comments to the question, you want to stick to amsart. As a personal note, I don't understand this: AMS classes were designed for specific typographic needs which don't include what you want, and tufte classes already offer you what you want.

Anyway, if you want to (ab)use the AMS classes, you'll have to do some work. One possibility is to take advantage of the space reserved for marginal notes and use the geometry package to change the page layout adding some additional space to the width reserved for these marginal notes. With the marginnote package, you can use \marginnote to typeset the images in the marginal notes area, using \captionof (from the caption package) to provide captions. A little example that could give you a starting point:

\documentclass[oneside]{amsart}
\usepackage[rmargin=3cm,textwidth=11cm,marginparwidth=6cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\captionsetup{justification=raggedright}

\newcommand\MarginFigure[4][width=4cm]{%
\marginnote{%
\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[#1]{#2}
  \captionof{figure}{#3}
  \label{#4}
\end{minipage}}}
\reversemarginpar
\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]
\MarginFigure{example-image-a}{a test figure}{fig:testa}
\lipsum[3-4]
\MarginFigure{example-image-b}{a test figure}{fig:testb}
\lipsum[1-3]
\MarginFigure{example-image-c}{a test figure}{fig:testb}
\lipsum[2-4]

\end{document}

enter image description here

One more question: Is it possible to put a title centered at the top of the page, outside of the margin formatting? — Randy Randerson, Aug 11 '13 at 14:29

How to leave space on the side of a page for figures

1 Answers1