Textpos

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. Other applications include placing material within, say, figures.

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. The environment is accompanied by various configuration commands. See the manual (pdf).

I have a collection of general advice about creating conference posters with LaTeX.

Rolf Niepraschk provided me with a wonderful demo of using Textpos along with his eso-pic package, and the calc package.

1.6a, 2005 October 13

The overriding of the figure and table environments now also works when there is no previous environment to override.

1.6, 2005 August 30

• Made {calc}-style dimensions to the {textblock*} argument work again (so that's what regression tests are for...)
• Override the figure and table environments within textblock environments, to avoid their surprising and undesirable interaction with textblock.

1.5b, 2005 June 13

The 1.5 release broke the textblock environment's optional argument, controlling the position of the reference point within the block. Fixed.

1.5a, 2005 March 26

Documentation fixes: added a section on the interaction between absolute mode and LaTeX's \newpage command.

1.5, 2005 March 23

Implement \TPMargin command, which causes a margin to appear round the blocks of text within textblock environments. This makes it easy to use blocks of colour which are larger than the block of text by a decent margin, or to put a border round textblocks by setting a suitably-sized margin and using the showboxes package option.

1.4, 2003 September 7

Changes in the handling of vertical spacing; inconsistent in some circumstances before. Slight (consequent) change to the algorithm which ensures that material is output in absolute mode even when the page is otherwise empty. See README for details. Version 1.3a will remain available for some time in case these fixes break things.

1.3a, 2003 June 24

Added the \textblockcolour command, to set the background colour of text blocks (there was a release 1.3, but it was broken, and withdrawn)

1.2b, 2002 July 1

Works around a bug present in at least one package, which leaves box255 holding an hbox at the wrong moment

1.2a, 2002 April 28

Version 1.2 had an error, which caused a confusing error if you gave any fractional part in the arguments to the {textblock} environment. This was fixed in version 1.2a, which adds a {textblock*} environment (fully compatible with calc), and does not attempt to support calc-style expressions in the parameters to the unstarred {textblock} environment.

1.2, 2002 April 21

Rolf Niepraschk niepraschk@ptb.de provided code to make textpos compatible with the calc package

See README for earlier versions

Download and installation

1. Download the file textpos-1.6a.tar.gz or textpos-1.6a.zip and unpack it.
2. Run LaTeX on the file textpos.ins -- this will unpack the style file textpos.sty amongst other files. Place this somewhere where TeX can find it.
3. Run LaTeX on the file textpos.dtx to obtain the documentation.

On CTAN: /tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/textpos/

To guard against the continual possibility of fixed versions breaking old documents, here are some selected older versions: