
Textpos: absolute positioning of text on the LaTeX page
-------------------------------------------------------

%%VERSION%%
Version 1.4

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, plus a starred variant,
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 v1.4, 7 September 2003
---------------------------------

* I made some changes in the handling of vertical spacing before and
after the {textblock} environment.  The environment claims not to affect
the vertical spacing (that is, to be `invisible'), and this was not
true in some circumstances.  There should be no difference in the
spacing which results in absolute mode, though there might be some
changes in relative mode _if_ the environment is surrounded by glue of
one type or another.

* Now {textblock} may be used in horizontal mode.  The behaviour
hasn't changed at all in fact (insert a \par), except that the
warning in this case has been removed, and the behaviour has been
documented.  It is this which prompted the reexamination of the
spacing around the environment, referred to above.

* Slight change to the technique which ensures that material is output
in absolute mode even when (as normal in that mode) there is no
non-{textblock} material on the page.  I believe this is perfectly
robust, but if you discover any error in this respect, it's probably
this version it was introduced.

Changes in v1.3a, 25 June 2003
------------------------------

Blush.  I was prompted to run the regression tests (so _that's_ what
they're for), and this fixes the error they expose.  You may now use
textpos _without_ loading the {color} package.

Changes in v1.3, 25 June 2003
-----------------------------

Added \textblockcolour command, to set the background colour of textblocks.

Changes in v1.2b, 1 July 2002
-----------------------------

Added code to cope with the case when box 255 isn't a vbox at shipout
(that's wrong, and not our fault, but we shouldn't collapse when it
happens!).  Thanks to Wybo Dekker and Hans Hagen for the report and
the fix.


Changes in v1.2a, 28 April 2002
-------------------------------

The way that I implemented the {calc} compatibility was wrong in v1.2
(Rolf's code was correct, but I `improved' it).  It meant that things
went badly wrong if you tried to give fractional sizes in the
dimensions arguments to the {textblock} environment (I choose the grid 
so that I only ever use whole numbers for these, so I hadn't had any
real numbers in my test cases).  There's now a {textblock*}
environment, which has absolute dimensions (that is, not in terms of
the module, though you can still use \TPHorizModule and \TPVertModule
as dimensions), to which you can give calc-compatible dimensions if
you wish.  You can't give expressions in the arguments to the
unstarred {textblock} environment.

Changes in  v1.2, 21 April 2002
-------------------------------

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

Added the [verbose] and [quiet] package options.

Changes in v1.1e, 19 April 2001
-------------------------------

Corrected a spacing misfeature, which caused extra space when
textblocks were interspersed with paragraphs.  Thanks to Peter
Muenster <peter@univ-rennes1.fr> for spotting and reporting this.

Changes in v1.1d, 6 June 1999
-----------------------------

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 <earthmen@mail1.cityweb.de> 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
