Moving tables and figures in LaTeX

Tables and figures have a tendency to surprise, by floating away from where they were specified to appear. This is in fact perfectly ordinary document design; any professional typesetting package will float figures and tables to where they'll fit without violating the certain typographic rules. Even if you use the placement specifier h for 'here', the figure or table will not be printed 'here' if doing so would break the rules; the rules themselves are pretty simple, and are given on page 198, section C.9 of the LaTeX manual. In the worst case, LaTeX's rules can cause the floating items to pile up to the extent that you get an error message saying "Too many unprocessed floats". What follows is a simple checklist of things to do to solve these problems (the checklist talks throughout about figures, but applies equally well to tables, or to "non-standard" floats defined by the float or other packages).

• Do your figures need to float at all? If not, consider the [H] placement option offered by the float package: figures with this placement are made up to look as if they're floating, but they don't in fact float. Beware outstanding floats, though: the \caption commands are numbered in the order they appear in the document, and a [H] float can 'overtake' a float that hasn't yet been placed, so that figures numbers get out of order.
• Are the placement parameters on your figures right? The default (tbp) is reasonable, but you can reasonably change it (for example, to add an h). Whatever you do, don't omit the 'p': doing so could cause LaTeX to believe that if you can't have your figure here, you don't want it anywhere. (LaTeX does try hard to avoid being confused in this way...)
• LaTeX's own float placement parameters could be preventing placements that seem entirely "reasonable" to you - they're notoriously rather conservative. To encourage LaTeX not to move your figure, you need to loosen its demands. (The most important ones are the ratio of text to float on a given page, but it's sensible to have a fixed set that changes the whole lot, to meet every eventuality.)

  \renewcommand{\topfraction}{.85}
  \renewcommand{\bottomfraction}{.7}
  \renewcommand{\textfraction}{.15}
  \renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{.66}
  \renewcommand{\dbltopfraction}{.66}
  \renewcommand{\dblfloatpagefraction}{.66}
  \setcounter{topnumber}{9}
  \setcounter{bottomnumber}{9}
  \setcounter{totalnumber}{20}
  \setcounter{dbltopnumber}{9}
  

  The meanings of these parameters are described on pages 199-200, section C.9 of the LaTeX manual.
• Are there places in your document where you could 'naturally' put a \clearpage command? If so, do: the backlog of floats is cleared after a \clearpage. (Note that the \chapter command in the standard book and report classes implicitly executes \clearpage, so you can't float past the end of a chapter.)
• Try the placeins package: it defines a \FloatBarrier command beyond which floats may not pass. A package option allows you to declare that floats may not pass a \section command, but you can place \FloatBarriers wherever you choose.
• If you are bothered by floats appearing at the top of the page (before they are specified in your text), try the flafter package, which avoids this problem by insisting that floats should always appear after their definition.
• Have a look at the LaTeX2e afterpage package. Its documentation gives as an example the idea of putting \clearpage after the current page (where it will clear the backlog, but not cause an ugly gap in your text), but also admits that the package is somewhat fragile. Use it as a last resort if the other possibilities below don't help.
• If you would actually like great blocks of floats at the end of each of your chapters, try the morefloats package; this 'simply' increases the number of floating inserts that LaTeX can handle at one time (from 18 to 36).
• If you actually wanted all your figures to float to the end (e.g., for submitting a draft copy of a paper), don't rely on LaTeX's mechanism: get the endfloat package to do the job for you.

afterpage.sty

Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/tools (zip, browse)

endfloat.sty

macros/latex/contrib/endfloat (zip, browse)

flafter.sty

Part of the LaTeX distribution

float.sty

macros/latex/contrib/float (zip, browse)

morefloats.sty

macros/latex/contrib/misc/morefloats.sty

placeins.sty

macros/latex/contrib/misc/placeins.sty

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=floats