Hi Rob,
a clean solution might be possible using the afterpage package.
Basically it provides the \afterpage{<something>} command, which
causes the expansion of <something> to be postponed until LaTeX has
shipped out the current page. If you insert your long table this way,
it should (theoretically) appear on the beginning of the next page
without interrupting the flow of text on the current page.
Daniel
On 14.01.2010, at 16:20, Rob Oakes wrote:
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
