[Tex/LaTex] Hover text for images in LaTeX using pdfLaTeX

pdftex

How to put a hovering title text for images (like the title attribute in HTML <img> tags) in LaTeX file using pdfLaTeX?

Best Answer

PDF viewers are not web browsers. There is no builtin reaction to a mouse hovering over an image, or a special tag or code to insert what it should show when it does.

Heck, even web browsers aren't required to exhibit this behavior. ALT text derives from the early days on the web when some web browsers couldn't show graphics, or people on slow connections turned them off; it put something in place of the images. It is retained, I think, mainly for visually impaired people who use text to speech technology to get information from webpages. The tooltip behavior is just a convention certain browsers adopted to make this text available even when graphics were possible. The w3's spec of the alt text attribute says nothing about tooltips.

If you want to replicate this behavior, you'll have to use a tooltip package like fancytooltips or cooltooltips. However, because the behavior is replicated using JavaScript, it'll only work in PDF viewers which suppport JavaScript, like Adobe Reader and Acrobat. (Even some users of these problems turn off JavaScript for security reasons.)

If instead you're aiming at a visually impaired audience, I would just put a text caption on the image.

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[Tex/LaTex] Image quality using PDFLaTeX

I'd recommend using vector-based graphics for your images. The best format to save images in is .pdf

With programs like Inkscape, you can draw as you would in MS Paint (and do much more), and because the images are vector-based instead of pixel-based, their quality should be preserved when converting to PDF in any way.

You can also try using the TikZ to program figures directly into your LaTeX file; although it takes longer, the output will never vary during compilations and conversions.

[Tex/LaTex] Good quality images in pdflatex

For diagrams you will get the best results when using vector graphics. Both gnuplot and matplotlib can export to vector graphics; file formats for vector graphics are e.g. eps or pdf or svg (there are many more).

As you are using pdfLaTeX, you should choose pdf as output format, because it will be easy to include in your document using the graphicx package and the \includegraphics{} command. To show you how to do it, I went to the matplotlib gallery and downloaded one of the many examples, saving it as myplot.pdf. The following code gives me absolutely satisfying quality.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\section{Introduction}
Some text and \Blindtext .
%
\begin{figure}%[!thb]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{myplot.pdf}
  \caption{The figure caption should go below the figure.}
  \label{fig:myplot}
\end{figure}
%
Some more text and \blindtext and a reference to figure~\ref{fig:myplot}.
Even more text and the end of the text.
\end{document}

PS: As discussed here, jpg is good for photos, png is good for e.g. screenshots.

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[Tex/LaTex] Image quality using PDFLaTeX

[Tex/LaTex] Good quality images in pdflatex

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