[Tex/LaTex] Change font size in figure environment

floatsfontsize

I'm writing a thesis-like document and I have sketches/figures made in TikZ and plots/graph made in gnuplot with the epslatex terminal. In the gnuplot manual it says if the font is not specified it will inherit the font and size from the context in the document. I'm not sure how TikZ does it.

I would like to reduce the font size of the text in the figures. How do I do that? In case it matters, I'm using the KOMA scrreprt class. I would very much like a way to do it so I don't have to modify the TikZ code or the tex-file produced by gnuplot. This question is not about the figure captions but the text in the figures themselves, although I will change the caption font size as well, obviously 🙂

Best Answer

How about

\begin{figure}
  \small % or any other font-changing command
  % code for including the picture
\end{figure}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Change font size relative to current font size

Have a look at the relsize package. Package description:

The basic command of the package is \relsize, whose argument is a number of \magsteps to change size; from this are defined commands \larger, \smaller, \textlarger, etc.

[Tex/LaTex] unify figure(gnuplot generated) font size and latex font size

I don't think that it would be possible to do this easily using the current set of tools (gnuplot and epslatex). The reason is that depending on the dimensions and font size of the final LaTeX document, you would need to calculate manually the dimensions and the font size of the figures.

What you require can be easily accomplished using pgfplots, which is a LaTeX package so that all the code for drawing graphics can be included into your .tex file. See example below where the figure naturally fills up the column width of the document and uses the same font size.

The process which I use to generate graphs is the following:

Run experiments using program of choice, output text file
Use pgfplots to write LaTeX code in main .tex file to plot graph

See the section "Reading coordinates from tables" of the pgfplots manual for more information.

\documentclass[5p]{elsarticle}

\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfplots}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    width=\columnwidth,
    xlabel=$x$,
    ylabel=$y$,
    legend pos=north west]
  \addplot {x^3};
  \addlegendentry{$y = x^3$};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{figure}

\lipsum[1-2]

\end{document}

enter image description here

\documentclass[3p]{elsarticle}

\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{pgfplots}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    width=\columnwidth,
    xlabel=$x$,
    ylabel=$y$,
    legend pos=north west]
  \addplot {x^3};
  \addlegendentry{$y = x^3$};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{figure}

\lipsum[1-2]

\end{document}

enter image description here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Change font size relative to current font size

[Tex/LaTex] unify figure(gnuplot generated) font size and latex font size

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