Perhaps its useful at this point to delve just a bit into the mechanism LaTeX uses to determine where a float goes. There are several integer-valued registers (called counters in TeX jargon) that limit the number of floats on a page: the number at the top, the number at the bottom, and the total. In addition, there are limits on the fraction of a page that can be occupied by floats — again, at the top and bottom separately, as well as the page as a whole. If there are too many floats to fit on a page, LaTeX pushes them on to the next page, and the next; eventually, floats may end up at the end of the document. If the [p] option has been provided to individual figures and tables, they may be pushed together onto a “float page” that has no text. But even here, the defaults are stingy about the amount of space taken up. The result is often that some individual float is too big to go anywhere, and so migrates to the end of the document. Unfortunately, the rule that says all figu...