How to force tables to be in the middle of the page

Question

I am trying to include a set of tables into my document. Since the tables are quite large, I want them to be on landscape pages, and centered right in the middle of the page (that is, centered in terms of pagewidth and pageheight as well).

This works fine for the second to last table, however, the first table always ends up right on top of the page, which looks rather unpleasant.

The Tex code looks like following:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\author{~~~}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage[margin=.01in, landscape]{geometry}
\begin{document}

\input{../stata_outputs/regressions_page_length.tex}
\clearpage

\input{../stata_outputs/regressions_clicks.tex}
\clearpage

[...]

\end{document}

The input files are automatically generate by Stata, and en excerpt looks like this:

\begin{table}[htbp]\centering
\def\sym#1{\ifmmode^{#1}\else\(^{#1}\)\fi}
\caption{page\_length after 0 weeks}
\begin{tabular*}{25cm}{@{\hskip\tabcolsep\extracolsep\fill}l*{5}{c}}
\toprule
&\multicolumn{1}{c}{(1)}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{(2)}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{(3)}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{(4)}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{(5)}\\
&\multicolumn{1}{c}{control"}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{+local}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{+global}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{plus}&\multicolumn{1}{c}{all}\\

[...]


\bottomrule
\multicolumn{6}{l}{\footnotesize \textit{t} statistics in parentheses}\\
\multicolumn{6}{l}{\footnotesize * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.010}\\
\end{tabular*}
\end{table}

Is there any way that I could force Latex to put these tables exactly where I want them, preferrably by setting an option in the main file? Editing each individual input file is not really an option, since the are generated multiple times a day...

Answer 1

You should be OK if only [p] is specified as the positioning argument, because the contents of page of floats is always centered vertically.

If it's not possible to set up Stata so that it outputs \begin{figure}[p] for this particular document, then adding the following code to the preamble should force it anyway:

\let\latextable\table
\renewcommand\table[1][]{\latextable[p]}

Note: if you can convince Stata to say

\def\sym#1{\ensuremath{^{#1}}

your document will be more robust. This is one of the few cases when \ensuremath is really useful.