LaTex “too many unprocessed floats” problem and solution

After adding about 30 scanned images into an appendix, I started getting “too many unprocessed floats” errors.  Doing a little digging, I found that many of the images were starting to back up on each other.  LaTeX was getting plugged up and was barfing.

The solution:

Add this to your top-level file:

\usepackage[section] {placeins}

By using the placeins package with the section option selected, LaTeX is forced to dump all of the unprocessed floats at the end of each section.  There are a few other ways to do it with that package but this way made the most sense to me.  Doing that, I get no more errors!  Well, at least from that problem.

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  1. Claudia’s avatar

    You just saved my day! Love you! Had the same problem and didn’t find a solution until I read your entry! Thanks very much!

    Reply

    1. DouglasVB’s avatar

      Glad it helped. It was driving me nuts until I found the solution, too. Thus I figured I should post it in case other people have the same trouble.

      Reply

  2. AcetameK’s avatar

    Thanks for the tip! This was one of the top search results in Google (and only one which had a short and easy answer :) . I was separating all my float images into separate chapters before I though of searching for this error.

    Reply

    1. DouglasVB’s avatar

      It baffled me for quite a long time before I finally struck upon the solution buried in some obscure manual. Hope this keeps helping people!

      Reply

  3. ray’s avatar

    Thanks man,

    You just saved me! 4 hours to the deadline and was stuck in arranging the report.

    Reply

    1. DouglasVB’s avatar

      Hey glad it helped! It took me a couple days to figure out the solution.

      Reply

      1. Lara’s avatar

        Unfortunately, this is not working for me. I have about 100 figures at the end of each Chapter. I added
        \usepackage[section] {placeins} to my preamble…didn’t work. Then I changed it to \usepackage[chapter] {placeins}…didn’t work. Any other solutions?? As a work around I do \clearpage but this creates blank pages.. Help!!??

        Reply

        1. DouglasVB’s avatar

          At that point you might be better off putting all of the figures into appendices… Otherwise I don’t know how you’d force that many figures to fall where you place them in the text.

          Reply

  4. Lara’s avatar

    Ok. That is unfortunate. Ummm so for each chapter I guess I can have a designated appendix. Is that how you do this?? And then just place the figures into each appendix sectio with the \usepackage[section] {placeins} within the preamble and everything should be set??? I just want to understand how exactly you did this. Thanks so much for this blog!!

    Reply

    1. DouglasVB’s avatar

      Yeah that should work. Actually if you are placing the figures in an appendix, you might not even need the placeins package.

      Reply