Latex use - control the display position of tables or graphics

It can be frus­trat­ing try­ing to get your fig­ures and tables to appear where you want them in a LaTeX doc­u­ment. Some­times, they just seem to float off onto another page of their own accord. Here is a col­lec­tion of tools and ideas that help you get con­trol of those pesky floats.

Use the place­ment options: h, t, b and p. For example

\begin{ figure}[htb]

causes LaTeX to try to fit the float “here”, or at the “top” of the cur­rent page (or the next page), or at the “bot­tom” of the cur­rent page (or the next page). If “p” is spec­i­fied, it will allow the float to take a whole page to itself. You can’t spec­ify only “h” as that is too restric­tive, and LaTeX will auto­mat­i­cally change it to “ht”. The default set­ting is “tbp”.

One of the rea­sons that the floats won’t go where you want them is that there are a lot of con­straints on where they can go. The main ones are

Counter		Default
topnumber	max­i­mum num­ber of floats at top of page	2
bottomnumber	max­i­mum num­ber of floats at bot­tom of page	1
totalnumber	max­i­mum num­ber of floats on a page	3
Com­mand
\topfraction	max­i­mum frac­tion of page for floats at top	0.7
\bottomfraction	max­i­mum frac­tion of page for floats at bottom	0.3
\textfraction	min­i­mum frac­tion of page for text	0.2
\floatpagefraction	min­i­mum frac­tion of float­page that should have floats	0.5

These can all be changed indi­vid­u­ally. But it is often eas­ier to add ! before the place­ment options, thus forc­ing LaTeX to ignore most of these con­traints. For exam­ple, I often use

\begin{ figure}[!htb]

If you want to change the defaults, the fol­low­ing val­ues give rea­son­able results:

\setcounter{ topnumber}{ 2} \setcounter{ bottomnumber}{ 2} \setcounter{ totalnumber}{ 4} \renewcommand{ \topfraction}{ 0.85} \renewcommand{ \bottomfraction}{ 0.85} \renewcommand{ \textfraction}{ 0.15} \renewcommand{ \floatpagefraction}{ 0.7}

The \clearpage com­mand starts a new page and inserts all floats that have not yet appeared before con­tin­u­ing. This can leave a bad page break, so a use­ful alter­na­tive is to use the afterpage pack­age, and then insert

\afterpage{ \clearpage}

which will put all the floats at the end of the cur­rent page.

A very use­ful pack­age is placeins. This pro­vides the com­mand \FloatBarrier which causes all unprocessed floats to be processed at that point, but does not start a new page unless it is nec­es­sary. To keep floats in the sec­tions in which they were included, use

\usepackage[section]{ placeins}

This silently puts a \FloatBarrier com­mand before each sec­tion. There are other options explained in the placeins documentation.

Another use­ful pack­age is flafter. This causes floats to always appear after their place­ment in the document.

If you really don’t want LaTeX to move your float at all, then use the float pack­age with the com­mand \restylefloat{figure} in the pre­am­ble. This allows you to spec­ify[H] as the posi­tion para­me­ter which means “Here and only Here”. How­ever, this often gives bad page breaks.

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