It's sometimes necessary to force a float to live on a page by itself. (It's sometimes even necessary for every float to live on a page by itself.) When the float fails to 'set', and waits for the end of a chapter or of the document, the natural thing to do is to declare the float as
\begin{figure}[p!]
but the overriding ! modifier has no effect on float page floats; so
you have to make the float satisfy the parameters.
Moving tables and figures offers some
suggestions, but doesn't solve the one-float-per-page question.
The 'obvious' solution, using the counter totalnumber ("total
number of floats per page") doesn't work:
totalnumber only applies to floats on 'text' pages (pages containing
text as well as one or more float). So, to allow any
size float to take a whole page, set \floatpagefraction really
small, and to ensure that no more than one float occupies a page, make
the separation between floats really big:
\renewcommand\floatpagefraction{.001}
\makeatletter
\setlength\@fpsep{\textheight}
\makeatother
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=floatpages