Page numbering with figures and tables

Question

I'm having a bit of trouble with my LaTeX document. I've been writing quite a bit, and have a few images and a table that I'm referring to.

My first problem is, that I have some text, then image, then text, then image, some more text and then my table. When I compile the whole thing it displays like: text, text, text, image, image, table. For my images I use the [htbp!] thing, which (as far as I understand) should display the image right where the text is..

My other problem is, that on the page with the two figures (which by the way is a separate page), my page numbering disappears. I doesn't show in my page footer like it does on all other pages..

My footer is as follows form my preamble:

\fancypagestyle{plain}{\fancyfoot[C]{\thepage\ af \pageref{LastPage}}}
\fancyhf{}
\pagestyle{fancy}

I display my images like this:

\begin{figure}[htbp!]
    \begin{center}
        \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{skitse-salg}
        \caption{Skitse over menuen hvori man søger}
        \label{fig:skitse-salg}
    \end{center}
\end{figure}

Finaly my table is made as follows:

\begin{center}
\begin{table}
  \begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | }
    \hline
    \textbf{Afsnit} & \textbf{Side} & \textbf{Funktion} \\ \hline
    1 & 2 & 3 \\ \hline
    4 & 5 & 6 \\ \hline
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{Tabel over de grafiske klasser, hvor i dokumentet de kan findes og hvad deres funktion er.}
  \label{table:gui-klasser}
  \end{table}
\end{center}

A little help would be much appreciated :-)

Answer 1

I can answer your question regarding the placement. Get rid of the t, p and b. Just put [!h] and that should place the float on the exact location. If you put t, p or b LaTeX considers then as other options you're likely to be happy with.

Answer 2

With regard to your second question (page numbers disappearing on any page that contains only floats): fancyhdr (which, according to your code snippets, you are using) features the \iffloatpage macro which allows to customize the header and footer depending on whether the current page is a "float page" or not. Check your settings of the fancy pagestyle (not the plain style!) and, if you want the "standard" header and footer on float pages, replace \iffloatpage{}{<whatever>} with <whatever>.

Answer 3

htbp means place the float here if possible, otherwise place it on the top if possible, otherwise bottom if possible, ..., Generally I prefer ht, for personal typographical taste. Note that the order of the specifiers are irrelevant. See chapter 6 of The LaTeX Companion. The ! specifier cause LaTeX to ignore most restriction on the floats placement, described below.

It seems in your situation that the figures are too large to be placed in normal page. Since LaTeX, by default, allows a float to occupy at most 70% of the text body if it is on top, and 30% for bottom, in addition, for floats and texts to be placed in the same page, (a normal page), the text has to occupy at least 20% area. These parameters can be changed by \def \topfraction, \bottomfraction and \textfraction respectively.

Personally I don't courage the use !h to force placement of floats. Instead, use package like afterpage, placeins, etc to make sure that the placement of the floats are not too far away from the text they belong to.

However, floating control is one of the weaknesses of LaTeX.