One of the requirements for our typesetting engine at MemoryPress.com is the ability to use images within a document such that the text flows around each image. This has been done before in several TeX macro packages, but the only one available for Plain TeX (or eplain) was figflow. FigFlow almost did the job, but had two shortcomings in our case:

  1. Images that had to be carried over to the following page could not appear in the first paragraph of that page,
  2. Images could only appear on ONE side of a paragraph at a time.

Double Figure Wrap
As I learned about TeX itself (in order to overcome the first obstacle), I began to see a way that it might be possible to enhance FigFlow to allow figures on BOTH sides of a paragraph. The “way” turned out to be much longer and more difficult than I thought, but it turns out that it is possible using a dash of “parshape” macro and several tablespoons of hacking. Click on the image to the left to see an example page from a PDF document.

The TeX source code for the macros that make this possible is available in this zip file. This is version 0.5.