Michael Hill wrote:
Hi everyone!
I'm writing my PhD thesis in Lyx and it's great but I have one problem
to which I couldn't find a solution (I've been trying for hours and
would really appreciate some help):
I have some figures (in floats) that are quite large but don't fill a
whole page. On their own everything's fine. However as soon as I add a
long caption to such a figure (easily three quoters of a page, which is
quite usual in biology) the float is too big for one page and just runs
over the margin which is unusable. Basically, all I want is for Lyx to
insert page breaks into long figure legends. If I can do this in a
straight forward manner I'll be very happy. I did try the "nonfloat"
package (http://wiki.lyx.org/Tips/PlacingFiguresAndProducingLegends) but
it was a mess because it replaces all figures in a certain way, which I
don't like and I'm not good enough at ERT to reconfigure all of
"nonfloats" parameters back to the original Lyx ones (that's the reason
I use Lyx and not clean LATEX). I really am happy with the whole rest of
the float formatting, it's just the page break that I need! Please tell
me that there's an easy way out without me risking my beautiful document
layout and formatting!
It is possible to spread a figure over several pages, but there is no
way to break up a float. Floats exist precisely because some matter
is not supposed to be broken up. Instead, these large pieces float
around so that it is possible to get nice page brekaing. If you typeset
large pictures that doesn't float, then you get problems with page
breaking instead. I.e. if there is plenty of room on a page but not
enough for the picture, then the picture goes on the next page, and
the rest of the page becomes blank. So writers normally use floats.
Floats also have a nice system for captions, that too is tricky to
get without floats.
Ideas for solutions:
* Package "dpfloat.sty" might actually do what you want. It lets you
spread floating material out over two facing pages, by using two
floats. In your case, you put the figure (and no caption) in
the first, and the caption alone in the next float.
You may even have pictures in both floats. But this mechanism
will not put a page break into a caption. You can achieve
a similiar effect by entering normal text into one of
the floats. You don't want to use captions in both, because then
you get a figure number for each of them.
See http://staff.washington.edu/fox/tex/dpfloat.shtml
It might look good if you systematically have the figure on
one page and the whole caption text on the other. At least if
you print two-sided.
* Scale down the figure, and/or use a smaller font for caption text.
This way the figure+caption can be made to fit in a single
full-page float.
* You seem to have lot of information in the captions. You obviously
need to have that information in your document, but does it have to be
in the floating figure itself? Could it be in the text that refers to
the figure, or alternatively in some appendix that lists all your
figures and detail information about them?
Helge Hafting
