Illustrations in LaTeX.

Illustrations for print on demand titles should be 300 DPI and close to the size in inches that it will be in the book. Generally the best way to get these images will be to download a PDF of the book and page through it with Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewing program. Do a right-click on the image in a page and select Save Image As... One of two things will happen:

1. The picture in the document will be saved to a file using the JPG format.

2. The entire page will be saved as an image file.

Generally speaking (but not always) a photograph will be saved as an image by itself, and a black and white drawing will be saved as an image of the entire page.

Images in PDFs will be well compressed and smaller than images you would get by photographing the pages and trying to do JPEG compression, for example.

If you got your PDF from Google books the images should already be cleaned up and white balanced. If you got it from archive.org the pages will be yellowed and in need of clean up. A free program you can use for this purpose is called The GIMP.

https://www.gimp.org/

The best way to clean up photographs is to use the White Balance filter. Black and white line drawings can be made to look new using the Threshold filter.

To put the image into your RST file you use lines like this:

.. figure:: images/image146.jpg
:align: center
:scale: 85 %
:alt: FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.

FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.

When you convert to LaTeX it will look like this:

\begin{figure}
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[scale=0.850000]{images/image146.jpg}}
\caption{FIG. 146.—Diagram showing how a wireless telephone transmitting system is arranged.}
\end{figure}

You can improve this by replacing [scale=0.850000] with [width=\textwidth] to make the image fit inside the left and right margins. You can also specify a width, like this: [width=4.5in]

LaTeX will put the image wherever it thinks it should go. It might stick it in the middle of a paragraph, for example. You might need to move the image between different paragraphs to put it in a place you can live with. Positioning images in a LaTeX document requires trial and error. There are good resources on the internet to explain what options you have in positioning images, so I'm not going to try and explain that here.

If you want to get fancy and have text wrap to the left or right of your illustrations that is possible. You need to do something like this:

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.5\textwidth}
\begin{center}
{\includegraphics[width=2.5in]{images/Image3.jpg}
\\Fig. 3. Montgolfier Balloon}
\end{center}
\end{wrapfigure}

Be aware that if you do this LaTeX will be worse than it usually is in positioning images. You will likely find that some images begin on one page and finish on the next.

The thing to keep in mind is that LaTeX is deciding how the pages will look. Not you. You can give it hints and that's about it. However, the end result can be worth it.

Next: working with footnotes.