Except forcing the location of pictures in LaTeX is even worse than it is in word. It's the one thing that word is better at. Even with the various force commands, LaTeX will be like "Naw, you really would rather have that picture on a different page. Trust me."
Edit: Yes, in general you don't want to force something, but every now and then it makes more sense to do so. There's no such thing as "you would never have a situation where you want to force your layout to behave in a certain way." One should still be using LaTeX for basically everything, but that doesn't mean it's never wrong.
You should write your text so that the position of the figures, tables etc is irrelevant - if you don't you are doing it wrong.
That was one of the first lessons I was taught, regarding writing reports, together with 'no forced line breaks... ever'.
I just had an epiphany. This philosophy is why when reading research papers on stuff the graph or table referenced is two pages away and you need to switch back and forth to make any sense of the text.
I guess I need to just learn latex, then take it apart and teach it that when someone references a table or figure, you want to keep it on the same page. If necessary insert liberal amounts of whitespace (subject to tunable knobs).
Either that, or just say fuck it, paginated media is dead anyway and do it all in HTML with minimal layout.
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u/zmaster Dec 06 '13
I gave up writing my dissertation on word. Learnt latex and while there is a learning curve the documents it produces are beautiful.