Textpos: absolute positioning of text on the LaTeX page ------------------------------------------------------- Version 1.1d, 6 June 1999 This package facilitates placing boxes at absolute positions on the LaTeX page. There are several reasons why this might be useful, but the main one (or at least my motivating one) is to help produce a large-format conference poster. This package provides a single environment, which contains the text (or graphics, or table, or whatever) which is to be placed on the page, and which specifies where it is to be placed. Changes in v1.1d ---------------- Clarified the copyright and licence status, including a copy of the GPL in the distribution. The immediate motivation was the CTAN campaign to do this for all the CTAN packages, but it should have been done before. Changes in v1.1c ---------------- Added an optional argument to \TPGrid, which controls a border round the grid. Made the checksum correct! Added the `overlay' option. Corrected a spacing bug, which made textblocks in the non-`absolute' mode drift out of place. Changes in v1.1b ---------------- Added a note to the effect that the required everyshi package can also be found at CTAN Changes in v1.1a ---------------- Blush! The example file distributed with the package exposed a bug! When there was no text on the page outside {textblock} blocks (the usual case, if you're producing a poster), the TeX engine didn't know there was anything on the page at all, and (sensibly) output nothing. I made the obvious fix (thanks to Bjoern Pedersen for diagnosing the problem, and to Wolfgang Erdmann for reporting it so promptly). Changes in v1.1, and credits ---------------------------- The package now clearly distinguishes between a `relative' and an `absolute' mode of positioning text (the distinction was largely present before, but neither as clear nor as robust). It also now distinguishes the horizontal and vertical units used for positioning. Olaf Maibaum (Olaf.Maibaum@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de) produced the elegant code which I've incorporated here as the `absolute mode'. Bjoern Pedersen (bjoern@poseidon.org.chemie.tu-muenchen.de) made the excellent suggestion (including code) that the horizontal and vertical modules should be independent. Installation ------------ Download the files textpos.dtx and textpos.ins. Run LaTeX on the file textpos.ins -- this will create the files textpos.sty textpos.drv Install textpos.sty somewhere TeX will find it. Run LaTeX on file textpos.drv to produce instructions and documentation. This package requires the services of Martin Schr\"oder's package everyshi. You will need to download this package from CTAN first. See \url{http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/ms/} or one of the other CTAN hosts. Licence ------- This software is copyright, 1999, Norman Gray. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. See the copyright declaration at the top of file textpos.dtx, and the file LICENCE for the licence conditions. Norman Gray, (norman@astro.gla.ac.uk) http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman