Control white spaces after figures in float package

Question

I've been using this code in my preamble to control the float of all my figures and tables in my document. However, I think it adds an unnecassary white space before and after each figure/table. Is there any way to control this and minimise the space between figures/a figure and text?

\usepackage{float}
\let\origfigure\figure
\let\endorigfigure\endfigure
\renewenvironment{figure}[1][2] {
    \expandafter\origfigure\expandafter[H]
} {
    \endorigfigure
}

latex floats figures to avoid getting bad white space at page breaks. [H] disables floating so by design introduces bad white space that you choose to manually fix by moving the figure by hand in the source so that it appears in a good place with respect to page breaking. You are also adding additional white space tokens due to missing % at ends of lines in the definition, but using [H] would be the main issue. — David Carlisle, Feb 10 '21 at 11:27
\renewenvironment{figure}[1][2] makes the default value of the optional argument be [2] which would be an error except that you never use the optional argument at all. — David Carlisle, Feb 10 '21 at 11:29
\expandafter\origfigure\expandafter[H expands H which is not expandable, you can delete both \expandafter as they are doing nothing. — David Carlisle, Feb 10 '21 at 11:31
Hi @DavidCarlisle, is there perhaps a better way to keep figures/tables in the position they are in my document and avoid the big white spaces without using a float? All of my figures and tables go to the end of my document without using a float so I'm trying to fix that — Tanga94, Feb 10 '21 at 11:41
The only purpose of the figure environment is to specify that the content may be moved. [H] makes sense as an occasional one-off over-ride but it doesn't make sense to make all figures do that, you may as well not use figure at all. I guess this question is a duplicate of https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-placement-in-text — David Carlisle, Feb 10 '21 at 11:50
Note that [ht] usually does the same thing as [H], and only moves the figure when [H] would leave a big hole in the document. — John Kormylo, Feb 10 '21 at 15:54

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '21 at 18:57

You have

\renewenvironment{figure}[1][2] {
    \expandafter\origfigure\expandafter[H]
} {
    \endorigfigure
}

and ask about white space. Almost every line could potentially add white space.

\renewenvironment{figure}[1][2]

this defines \begin{figure} to be an environment with one optional argument, if the option is not used then \begin{figure} is equivalent to \begin{figure}[2] (this was presumably not intended as 2 has no defined behaviour here) As the optional argument is not used at all, the default is arbitrary, perhaps [1][] would be clearer.

{

This adds a space token at the start of the definition, this could, depending where the figure is placed may produce a spurious additional line of white space in the resulting document. It is usually better to use {% so no space token is added to the definition.

\expandafter\origfigure\expandafter[H]

This expands the non expandable token H before calling \origfigure so this is equivalent to

\origfigure[H]

As above this adds a space token to the start of the environment, this is less likely to generate white space in the output, but again ending the line with % is good practice.

As #1 is not used the user-supplied or default positioning argument is ignored here and [H] is always used.

H by design produces bad white space at page breaks, as the reason for floating figures is to avoid bad page breaks and this disables that. A better alternative would be just to use \includegraphics directly as figure is only there to specify that the figure is a float (ie, may be moved). H (which was actually my idea originally:-) is just for final manual over-ride and manual positioning in final edit stages of a document, it should never be used as a default mechanism.

} {

Again the end of line here adds a space token and as in the first line this will produce white space in the output in some cases.

Control white spaces after figures in float package

1 Answers1