The table itself is pretty big, takes up almost the entire page. I'm creating it between two blocks of text however when compiled into a pdf it appears to just "float" to the bottom of the document. Why is this happening? How do I correct it?
asked Nov 5, 2011 at 13:32 331 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 5 5 bronze badgesThe environment table is supposed to float so it's working as intended. Actually it's often a good practice to let LaTeX place the floats.
To control the placement of the table you can provide the environment with options. For example you can use the option htbp as in
\begin[htbp] . \endanswered Nov 5, 2011 at 13:41 36.4k 30 30 gold badges 143 143 silver badges 205 205 bronze badges [htp] or [htbp] , not [h] only. Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 13:54 @egreg Oops! Fixed. Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 13:59
Adding ! in front of the h (ie [!htp]) can try and overule LaTeX as to where the best placement for the table is.
Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 15:39 @drezha: The float package provides the H specifier for overriding float placement to H ere. Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 15:50Define 'often a good practice', please. Why? To be honest, I often get the idea latex tries to avoid overfulls, underfulls and overflows, but does not consider that specific placement might appear better of be clearer. In particular when LaTeX throws a float all the way to the bottom of a document on separate page, which is ugly and confusing when the table was referenced to 5 pages ago.