Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition

9 Floating tables and figures

Whether a figure is imported with \includegraphics (Chapter 8) or produced with the picture environment of Chapter 16, it is inserted in the text where the drawing or importing commands are issued, coming between the previous and following texts. This can present the same difficulties as for tables, described in Section 6.2.5: if the figure is so high that it no longer fits on the current page, that page is prematurely terminated and the figure is placed at the top of the next page, with too much empty space left on the original page.

In Section 6.2.5 we explore how this problem is solved for tables. Now we give a complete description of the float procedures that apply to both figures and tables.

9.1 Float placement ...