captionsfloatsmarginspositioning
I have two figure/caption related questions.
Firstly, in many textbooks, it is customary to put thin figures (along with their captions) entirely in the outer margin of the page. What is the most elegant way of doing this in LaTeX?
Secondly, for wider figures many books set the figure to be the width of the page (so spewing out into the outer margin) and then place the caption in the margin space below the figure. How can one achieve this effect in LaTeX?
You can solve your problem by loading the subcaption package. (The subcaption package is incompatible with packages that provide similar functionality, such as subfigure and subfloat. If you use subcaption, be sure not to load one of these competing packages as well.) The subcaption package provides the environments subfigure and subtable, which take as their argument the desired width of the sub-figure/table in question. In the Minimum Working Example (MWE) below, I've set this width to 0.49\linewidth, as you do in your example code. The MWE also illustrates how many may create cross-references to the entire float as well as to one or more of its components.
Note the use of the \centering commands inside the subfigure environments; it's preferable to use this command rather than \centerline. In addition, since I don't have access to the .png files you list in your code, I've loaded the graphicx package with the demo option -- this will create black "dummy" rectangles. In your "real" code, you should of course omit the demo option.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{subcaption}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}{0.49\linewidth} \centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.2]{figure/figA.png}
\caption{Figure on left side}\label{fig:figA}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}{0.49\linewidth} \centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.2]{figure/figB.png}
\caption{Figure on right side}\label{fig:figB}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Overall caption} \label{fig:twofigs}
\end{figure}
\noindent
Some cross-references: First, we refer to Figure~\ref{fig:twofigs}.
Second, we can also refer to the component figures individually,
viz., to Figures~\ref{fig:figA} and \ref{fig:figB}.
\end{document}
Addendum For more information on what the parameters \linewidth and \textwidth do, see this answer to a question that was posed some time ago, viz., Difference between \textwidth, \linewidth and \hsize.
You could use \captionsetup[<name>]{...} ... \captionsetup{options=<name>} to define and execute options for custom commands or environments, e.g.:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{caption}
\addtolength{\evensidemargin}{1.5cm}
\addtolength{\textwidth}{-1.5cm}
\addtolength{\marginparwidth}{20pt}
\addtolength{\marginparsep}{10pt}
\captionsetup[marginfigure]{
justification=raggedright,
font=small}
\newcommand\marginfigure[1]{%
\marginpar{%
\captionsetup{type=figure,options=marginfigure}%
#1}}
\begin{document}
text text text ...
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics{figure1}
\caption{figure 1 text, which I don't want to have a raggedright justification, since it looks quite good without it due to the many words that I can fit into one line in this type of caption.}
\end{figure}
some
more
text
about
something
\marginfigure{\includegraphics[width=\marginparwidth]{figure2}
\caption{Here for figure 2, the caption will look odd when few words are stretched across the marginparwidth}}
\end{document}
Best Answer
You can use the the tufte-book class. It has margin figures, margin notes as well as full width environments. In general it has the general style you are looking for. It also has a fullwidth environment for larger figures - as you describe.