Hi Helge, You make good points, but there is a third use case that I am currently struggling with (and which Liviu's solution appears to address, at least in part). What do you do with long tables that you don't want to disrupt the flow of the text?
Let me give you an example. I am currently working on a book about writing with open source tools. One of the chapters in this book is an overview of the different LaTeX classes and their options. For some of the classes (like Memoir and Beamer), there are many different options that control the appearance of headers, footers and chapter headings. In trying to describe the options, I've found that the most space efficient way is to create a long-table. Some of these tables can stretch over two, or sometimes even three pages. However, I want them to work like floats, in that the table will be started at the top of a new page without disrupting the flow of the other text. The current long-table approach doesn't work very well in that I have to manually calculate the page breaks and move the environment to an appropriate place in the text. This is similar to how I would need to work with Word and is very frustrating. Are you aware of a method to position long tables so that they combine the best featrues of the float environment (e.g. semi-automatic displacement so that they don't disrupt the flow of the text) and the long-table environment (so that you can have page breaks at appropriate places)? For me, getting the sort of sub-labeling described by Liviu is not something I am concerned about. In fact, I would prefer to maintain the standard labeling scheme (Table ChapNum.TableNum). Cheers, Rob Oakes
