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A.1 Too Many Unprocessed Floats

A common problem PhD student's encounter when writing a thesis is the “too many unprocessed floats” error.[Too many unprocessed floats] This is usually caused by having too many figures and tables in the results chapter and not enough surrounding text. If this happens, there are a number of things you can try doing:

  1. Make sure you haven't been too restrictive in where you want your floats to go. If you use a placement specifier, give LaTeX as many options as possible. For example:

    \begin{figure}[htbp]

    which indicates that the figure can be placed “here” (h), at the top of a page (t), at the bottom of the page (b) or on a page solely consisting of floats (p). If you just use the h placement specifier then you are stating: “I want it here and nowhere else!” If TeX can't put it exactly here, then you have given no alternative place to put it, and it won't get placed anywhere, unless a \clearpage command is issued, at which point all remaining unprocessed floats will be dumped at that point. If you are determined that an image must be placed exactly here then it should not be placed in a floating environment.

  2. Try increasing the amount of text in the chapter. Remember that you should never simply print all the figures and tables in a results chapter without discussing them to some extent.

  3. If all else fails, try using the \clearpage command. This forces all unprocessed floats to be processed immediately, and start a new page. This may result in the page ending prematurely, if you wish to avoid this, you can use the afterpage package, and use the command:

For other problems, check the FAQ [19].


This book is also available as A4 PDF or 12.8cm x 9.6cm PDF or paperback (ISBN 978-1-909440-02-9).

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