dimensionsminipageparboxwidth
I can't use \width as the argument for \parbox or minipage.
MWE:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Bla \begin{minipage}{\width}{test}\end{minipage}
\end{document}
To my understanding, everything I've read says that this should work (for instance Wikibooks and minipage tag wiki).
Why is this not working?
I assume you intend the second argument in brackets following \begin{minipage} to act as the subfloat's caption. If that's your objective, you should place the argument immediately after \subfloat rather than after \begin{minipage}.
Note that the minipage environment can take up to three optional arguments -- an "outer" vertical alignment indicator, which can be t for top, c for center, and b for bottom; a height variable (a TeX "length" entity); and an "inner" position indicator -- and two mandatory arguments: a length variable to set the intended width of the environment and the actual contents of the minipage, both to be placed in curly braces.
Another observation: Unless there's a very good reason for making the subfloat graphs have different widths, you may just want to give all four the same width. This may be achieved by setting the option width=\linewidth when executing \includegraphics.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{subfig}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx} %leave off the 'demo' option in your real document
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\subfloat[Structured Mesh]{%
\begin{minipage}{0.48\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ch-SmallStrain/Graphics/Structured}
\end{minipage}}
\hspace{\fill} % induce horizontal separation
\subfloat[Unstructured Mesh]{%
\begin{minipage}[c]{0.48\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ch-SmallStrain/Graphics/Unstructured}
\end{minipage}}
\subfloat[Structured Mesh, zoomed to red box shown above]{%
\begin{minipage}{0.48\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ch-SmallStrain/Graphics/StructuredCloseup}
\end{minipage}}
\hspace{\fill} % induce horizontal separation
\subfloat[Unstructured Mesh, zoomed to red box shown above]{%
\begin{minipage}{0.48\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{ch-SmallStrain/Graphics/UnstructuredCloseup}
\end{minipage}}
\caption{Meshes for the Shearing example\label{fig:Meshes-for-the}}
\end{figure}
\end{document}
Please always post complete documents not fragments, so this is untested, but putting a longtable in a minipage removes all the features of longtable and using longtable instead of tabular removes all the features of tabular, in particular tabular are naturally the width of their content.
\begin{table}[!htb]
\begin{tabular}[t]{l}
Content
\end{tabular}%
\quad
\begin{tabular}[t]{lll}
Content
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Best Answer
\widthis a command which is only locally defined in boxes that have a natural width, somakes a box twice as wide as would normally be the case.
However the content of a
\parboxorminipagehas no natural width in that sense, it is set in vertical mode so broken into lines to a width that must be specified in advance.