How do I ensure that figures appear in the section they're associated with?

Question

Often floats may land quite a bit later in the document than the point they are created, sometimes after a section break.

Is there a way to force a new section to start on a new page, after any unplaced floats?

See also the very related question How to avoid splitting tables between sections for more possible solutions. — Martin Scharrer, Jun 13 '11 at 11:34

Rob Hyndman · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-30T21:45:39.717

242

Use the placeins package.

As noted in the comments, you can use

\usepackage[section]{placeins}

to automatically ensure floats do not go into the next section.

The package also gives you a \FloatBarrier command that you can use to prevent floats to appear beyond some point in your document. Use it as

% ... some floats here ...

\FloatBarrier

\subsection{My new subsection}

edited Jan 30 '17 at 21:45

answered Jul 27 '10 at 05:35

Rob Hyndman

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Instead of putting manually \FloatBarrier before each new section you can just use section option of placeins package. – przemoc Jul 04 '11 at 11:14
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@przemoc namely \usepackage[section]{placeins} – Jodi Schneider Aug 04 '13 at 00:12
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@przemoc Note, however, that this doesn't seem to work for subsections. – Filipe Correia Jan 09 '14 at 13:10
worked, great, should I remove format specifier's if using the \FloatBarrier? – Brian Var Mar 03 '15 at 14:38
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@FilipeCorreia, I added \begin{figure}[!h] to the figure and it also works for subsections that way. – Ali Jan 30 '17 at 11:46
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However, the placeins package does not ensure that floats don't go into the previous section, i.e. a float with [t] may appear above the start of the section in which the float was specified. – Witiko Nov 02 '20 at 14:48

score 72 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 05:33

72

The command \clearpage will not only start a new page, but will also force any unset floats to be set before the page break. For documents with a left and a right page, \cleardoublepage does the same, but also ensures that the next non-blank page is a right hand page.

This is all independent of the section break, save that if you are using a class that does not put a page break before section breaks, this method will force them. But, from your question, this doesn't seem to be a problem in your case.

answered Jul 27 '10 at 05:33

vanden

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This has been driving me nuts for 3 months. THANK YOU! – PengOne Aug 29 '11 at 03:07
Simple. Full control. No extra packages needed. What else do you want? – luchonacho Jan 29 '16 at 16:53
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This is not a good solution, since it requires clearing things every single time, instead of defining what one wants once and for the whole document. It clutters up the code a little bit. – Zelphir Kaltstahl Jan 06 '17 at 14:25
When I place this command before a new section, figures from there appear above section name. – Yaroslav Nikitenko Sep 15 '20 at 12:20

score 37 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

I'm now using:

\usepackage{placeins}

\let\Oldsection\section
\renewcommand{\section}{\FloatBarrier\Oldsection}

\let\Oldsubsection\subsection
\renewcommand{\subsection}{\FloatBarrier\Oldsubsection}

\let\Oldsubsubsection\subsubsection
\renewcommand{\subsubsection}{\FloatBarrier\Oldsubsubsection}

This is shamelessly plugged from the union of this and other answers on the topic, plus this. As I can't comment yet (silly requirement, that..), I'm sharing it with via a new answer instead.

Edit: Plus, for the sake of copy-pastability for others, I've incorporated egregs excellent correction to use the non-argumented version of section redefinition (before, the snippet above read \renewcommand{\section}[1]{\FloatBarrier\Oldsection{#1}} etc. - Thanks, egreg

Don't redefine \section with an argument: \renewcommand{\section}{\FloatBarrier\Oldsection} is sufficient and better, as it allows to still use \section*{title} and \section[Short]{Long title}. The same for \subsection and \subsubsection. — egreg, Mar 27 '15 at 10:29

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 09 '18 at 20:42

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Code works well for all sections and subsections for me , package needs to be updated on miktex package library

\usepackage[section]{placeins}

\FloatBarrier

Above/Below every image or section

answered Apr 09 '18 at 20:42

Yash Trivedi

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This doesn't add anything new to answer the question. – Werner Apr 09 '18 at 21:03

How do I ensure that figures appear in the section they're associated with?

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