Positioning tables

Tables can get quite big. If there’s insufficient free space on a page to accommodate the table, that table will be pushed to the next page. This would leave white space at the end of the page. You could manually move some text to compensate. But imagine having a large document with many tables; manually moving images to balance page breaks can become cumbersome. Fortunately, LaTeX offers an automated solution for managing this.

How to do it...

This is the standard way of including tables:

1. Use a table environment.
2. Center the content, if desired, using the \centering command.
3. Write a caption.
4. Add a label for cross-referencing.
5. Write the table content using a tabular environment.

A typical code sequence looks like this:

\begin{table}[htbp!]  \centering  \caption{A description}  \label{tab:name}  \begin{tabular}{...}    ...  \end{tabular}\end{table}

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