endfloat and ctable are incompatible?

Question

It seems that endfloat and ctable are incompatible:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{endfloat}
\usepackage{ctable}
\begin{document}

\ctable[caption = Queries available, pos = H, center, botcap]{ll}
{% notes
}
{% rows
\FL
search ``by='' & purpose
\ML
abstract & search terms in the publication abstract
\\\noalign{\medskip}
author & match authors in the publication
\\\noalign{\medskip}
id.taxon & Taxon identifier number from TreeBase
\\\noalign{\medskip}
tree & The title for the tree
\LL
}

Gives the error:

! Undefined control sequence.
\\  ->\let \reserved@e 
                       \relax \let \reserved@f \relax \@ifstar {\let \reserv...
l.21 }

Is there any way to work around this problem? Either

1. an alternative to endfloat that works for ctable,
2. or at least a way to make endfloat ignore the ctable instead of error?

Edit:

I'm looking for a solution that still uses ctable for the table. Ideally some option that I can set in the preamble to resolve the conflict, or create endfloat-style behavior without the endfloat package? (Editing the table itself isn't in the spirit of the endfloat package, since I could equally well move the table to the end manually, but that is not a good programmatic solution to apply over many documents.)

Answer 1

I don't know about alternatives to endfloat, but there's a pretty good alternative to ctable: the "regular" table and tabular environments, combined with the commands of the booktabs package. (Replace the \FL, \ML, and \LL macros with \toprule, \midrule, and \bottomrule, and you're mostly done converting the ctable. The similarity between the types of horizontal lines is of course anything but coincidental, given that ctable uses the bookstabs package internally.)

The following MWE produces a table that looks pretty much like the one your code produces, while being fully compatible with endfloat:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{endfloat,booktabs}
\begin{document}

\begin{table}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.35} % vary this to suit your needs
\centering
\begin{tabular}{ll}
\toprule
search ``by='' & purpose\\
\midrule
abstract & search terms in the publication abstract\\
author   & match authors in the publication\\
id.taxon & Taxon identifier number from TreeBase\\
tree     & The title for the tree\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\caption{Queries available}
\end{table}
\end{document}