# Plenty of space on page but can't make figures bigger

I am trying to put two figures on one page in latex, without using minipage. But the second figure is moved to the next page at a certain size, even though there is plenty of white space left on the page. Any ideas?

-
Welcome to TeX.sx! Please add a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates your problem. It is considered a lot better to put in some code that will compile, as it makes it a lot easier for us to copy it into our text editor and work with it, and see exactly what it is you are trying to do. – Corentin Nov 13 '12 at 11:08
Use subfigures..? (e.g., try texdoc subfigure) Without a minimal example to look at, it is hard (for me) to give useful advice. – jon Nov 13 '12 at 11:09
Are they subfigures or seperate ones? In what way are you trying to place those figures? Using picture environment or figure environment? – Thanos Nov 13 '12 at 15:31
or else the subcaption package – cmhughes Nov 13 '12 at 16:18

The fraction of the page that may be used for figures is by default not the full page it is controlled by various parameters, notably \topfraction You can set these parameters or you could use an optional parameter \begin{figure}[!tbp] where the ! tells LaTeX to ignore the size constraints.

-
I'd add that \topfraction (AFAIK) only applies to "mixed" pages (running text plus floats), not to "exclusive" float pages. – lockstep Nov 13 '12 at 13:17
Yes there are several parameters but I didn't want to mention them all \floatpagefraction acts on float pages, but also the integer (count) parameters. ! ignores them all anyway. – David Carlisle Nov 13 '12 at 13:26

Without a minimal example one can't be sure, but you may put two separate graphics and their respective captions into a single figure (floating) environment.

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}
\centering

\rule{1cm}{15cm}% placeholder for first graphic
\caption{A figure}\label{fig:x}

\vspace{\floatsep}

\rule{5cm}{1cm}% placeholder for second graphic
\caption{Another figure}\label{fig:y}

\end{figure}

\end{document}

-
{"extraction_info": {"found_math": true, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 0, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 1, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0, "katex": 0, "math-container": 0, "wp-katex-eq": 0, "align": 0, "equation": 0, "x-ck12": 0, "texerror": 0, "math_score": 0.6419020295143127, "perplexity": 1498.409517630963}, "config": {"markdown_headings": true, "markdown_code": true, "boilerplate_config": {"ratio_threshold": 0.3, "absolute_threshold": 10, "end_threshold": 15, "enable": true}, "remove_buttons": true, "remove_image_figures": true, "remove_link_clusters": true, "table_config": {"min_rows": 2, "min_cols": 3, "format": "plain"}, "remove_chinese": true, "remove_edit_buttons": true, "extract_latex": true}, "warc_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-18/segments/1461861812410.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20160428164332-00117-ip-10-239-7-51.ec2.internal.warc.gz"}