Sphinx to Latex Figure Placement

Question

I'm trying to used Sphinx to generate a manual in latex and HTML, but I'm having issues with the figure placement within latex. In Sphinx my figures are as follows:

.. figure:: _images/somepicture.png
    :figwidth: 100 %
    :width: 100 %
    :align: center

    some caption

So that when it writes to HTML, the figures span the whole width of the page. This works fine.

The trouble comes in latex, where a typical figure in latex writes as:

\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centering

\includegraphics[width=1.000\linewidth]{reset.png}
\end{figure}

The trouble is the [htbp] placement option. Since the images are \linewidth in length, they are very large and end up floating to the next page, and any often the order of text and figures in the document is not preserved in the the pdf output. I want to change [htbp] to [H].

I found an option to put into the conf.py file under latex elements section called 'figure_align', but when I use it, it doesn't work. The link is here http://sphinx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/config.html#options-for-latex-output

in my conf.py document, I have the following:

latex_elements = {
# The paper size ('letterpaper' or 'a4paper').
#'papersize': 'letterpaper',

# The font size ('10pt', '11pt' or '12pt').
#'pointsize': '10pt',

# Additional stuff for the LaTeX preamble.
#'preamble':'',

#Figure placement within LaTeX paper NOT WORKING
'figure_align': 'H'

}

My question is, why isn't this option working and what can I do to make it work?

The H float modifier requires the float(ctan.org/pkg/float) package \usepackage{float}, do you think it could help ? Generally speaking, what do you mean exactly by it doesn't work (are there any errors generated , etc.) ? — Bertrand Caron
I have also tried adding '\\usepackage{float}' to the preamble element, with no luck as well. By 'it doesn't work' I meant that when it writes to LaTeX there are no errors or anything in the build but when I look at the .tex file all the figures still have the [htbp] option, the 'figure_align' element did not modify them as I expected. — Alex
Aren't there some caching mechanisms in python that would explain why your changes in the code are not reflected in its execution (byte code, etc. ) ? — Bertrand Caron
Have you tried either make clean, or removing your _build folder first before your new build? — Cole
I have tried make clean before building, didn't result in anything different. — Alex

zerocog zerocog · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-14T20:27:21

When modifying conf.py you may have forgot the comma after the 'H'.

Latex figure (float) alignment

'figure_align': 'H',

Works for me on sphinx-doc version 1.4.6.

'figure_align' Latex figure float alignment, default ‘htbp’ (here, top, bottom, page). Whenever an image doesn’t fit into the current page, it will be ‘floated’ into the next page but may be preceded by any other text. If you don’t like this behavior, use ‘H’ which will disable floating and position figures strictly in the order they appear in the source. Reference Sphinx-doc latex_element.

Sphinx to Latex Figure Placement

2 Answers

Latex figure (float) alignment