This package facilitates placing boxes at absolute positions on the
LaTeX page. There are several reasons why this might be useful, but
the main one (or at least my motivating one) is to help produce a
large-format conference poster. Other applications include placing
material within, say, figures. Textpos is also discussed in the TeX FAQ
entry on absolute positioning.
This package provides a single environment, which contains the text
(or graphics, or table, or whatever) which is to be placed on the
page, and which specifies where it is to be placed. The environment
is accompanied by various configuration commands. See the manual (pdf).
Rolf Niepraschk provided me with a wonderful demo
(tex,
pdf)
of using Textpos along with his eso-pic package,
and the calc package, to produce a grid which can help lay out
material on the page.
The source is held online,
where you can find an issues list
Installation and further information
Run LaTeX on the file textpos.ins – this will
unpack the style file textpos.sty amongst other files.
Place this somewhere where TeX can find it.
Run LaTeX on the file textpos.dtx to obtain the
documentation.
Use the ltshipout package to place boxes in absolute mode.
Therefore the package should now be compatible with LaTeX3.
Many thanks to Ulrike Fischer for guidance on the changes which were required here.
The code has moved from bitbucket.org to
code.nxg.name,
since bitbucket have closed down support for Mercurial. The
outstanding issues have been preserved, but have not (yet) been
migrated to a new system, so may become inaccessible.
1.10b1, 2020 January 26
Add the \TPShowGrid macro.
Become invisible in horizontal mode.
Note: this is a change in behaviour:
Before this the behaviour of the package in horizontal
mode was deliberately somewhat underspecified (with an intended
implication of ‘don't do this’), and the package, for want of anything
more imaginative to do, simply threw in a paragraph break, which
produced ugly spacing in some circumstances. As a result of
user
feedback, from version 1.10 it seemed reasonable to try a little
harder to be invisible in the horizontal case
(see issue 16).
Various documentation improvements.
1.9.1, 2019 April 15
Added the \TPReferencePosition command, to change the
default reference position away from [0,0].
Added the experimental\TPoptions{discardcontent=true} option, to improve
compatibility with TikZ
(see issue 6 in the repository).
Note: This option may change or disappear in future versions, and the author would be
particular interested to get feedback regarding it.
Documentation: added discussion of the implementation difference
between relative and absolute mode, and when one is preferable to the other.
Documentation: note that the showboxes option is intended only as
a basic aid to layout.
(Version 1.9 was partially released, but it contained an
attribution error which could be most easily fixed by a minor version bump).
1.8, 2016 June 5
Added the \TPoptions command, to switch modes on and
off within the document. Various documentation tweaks.
The behaviour of \TPMargin and
\TPMargin* were somewhat underspecified in versions of
Textpos before v1.8, and in consequence inconsistently implemented.
This has now been rationalised, but the change may change
documents which relied on the previous behaviour.
Thanks to Richard Schreiber for the detailed bug report.
In this release, I switched to more conventional dotted-integer, n.m.r,
version numbers, from the LaTeX-style model with intermediate releases denoted by letters.
1.7j, 2014 January 3
Re-released under the LPPL.
1.7i, 2012 November 10
Bugfix: further change to the way the {color} package is loaded
(fixes issue 2); now finally fixed?
1.7h, 2012 June 1
Bugfix: further change to the way the {color} package is loaded.
Some documentation tweaks.
Pointers to bitbucket repository.
1.7g, 2010 September 30
Bugfix: change the way we handle the {color} package not being
loaded – replacement \color command is now robust.
Thanks to Joseph Wright for the bugreport.
Also adjusted documentation of reference points.
1.7f, 2009 May 28
The change in behaviour introduced in v1.7e is now documented (it
was unspecified before, and 1.7e didn't commit itself one way or the
other).
1.7e, 2009 March 29
Daniel Richard G noted that the order in which textblock contents
was laid down on the page was counter-intuitive, since one would
expect that later environments go 'on top of' earlier ones. This
order was unspecified before this version, but I've changed this,
satisfying a principle of least surprise (later ones now go 'on
top').
1.7d, 2007 March 30
Axel Sommerfeldt suggested a further alternative approach, even more
lightweight, and I incorporated a version of that.
1.7c, 2007 March 29
Giovanni Radilla reported a problem with captions, which meant that the
captions weren't appearing properly in the list of figures. Dan
Luecking and Axel Sommerfeldt analysed the problem precisely, and the
latter provided code which I've incorporated in this fix.
1.7b, 2007 March 21
Robert Whittaker reported a problem with \TPmargin,
which meant that lists and quotations (and other things which
manipulated \leftskip and \rightskip) were
not decreasing in size when you set \TPmargin non-zero.
Fixed.
1.7a, 2006 September 2
Version 1.7 created an inadvertant dependency on the
{color} package. Now, if you do not load that package,
\textblockrulecolour will have no effect, rather than
failing. Textpos will give you a warning in this case, reminding you
to load the {color} package.
1.7, 2006 August 24
Added the \textblockrulecolour and
\TPshowboxes{true,false} commands, to further control the
display of the rules around the text blocks.
1.6b, 2006 August 10
Minor documentation fixes
1.6a, 2005 October 13
The overriding of the figure and table environments now also works
when there is no previous environment to override.
1.6, 2005 August 30
Made {calc}-style dimensions to the
{textblock*} argument work again (so that's what
regression tests are for...). Override the figure and
table environments within textblock
environments, to avoid their surprising and undesirable interaction
with textblock.
1.5b, 2005 June 13
The 1.5 release broke the textblock environment's optional
argument, controlling the position of the reference point within the
block. Fixed.
1.5a, 2005 March 26
Documentation fixes: added a section on the
interaction between absolute mode and LaTeX's \newpage
command.
1.5, 2005 March 23
Implement \TPMargin command, which causes a margin
to appear round the blocks of text within textblock
environments. This makes it easy to use blocks of colour which
are larger than the block of text by a decent margin, or to put a
border round textblocks by setting a suitably-sized margin and using
the showboxes package option.
1.4, 2003 September 7
Changes in the handling of vertical spacing; inconsistent in some
circumstances before. Slight (consequent) change to the algorithm
which ensures that material is output in absolute mode even when the
page is otherwise empty. See README for details. Version 1.3a will
remain available for some time in case these fixes break things.
1.3a, 2003 June 24
Added the \textblockcolour command, to set
the background colour of text blocks
1.3, 2003 June 24
(there was a release 1.3, but it was broken, and immediately
replaced by 1.3a)
1.2b, 2002 July 1
Works around a bug present in at least one package,
which leaves box255 holding an hbox at the wrong moment
1.2a, 2002 April 28
Version 1.2 had an error, which caused a confusing error
if you gave any fractional part in the arguments to the
{textblock} environment. This was fixed in version 1.2a,
which adds a {textblock*} environment (fully compatible
with calc), and does not attempt to support calc-style
expressions in the parameters to the unstarred
{textblock} environment.
1.2, 2002 April 21
Rolf Niepraschk niepraschk@ptb.de provided code to
make textpos compatible with the calc package