The longtable environment pushes content below it into the bottom margin of a page

Question

When I have two floating environments on a page (one figure and one table), the longtable can push the content below it into the bottom margin of the page. Here is a minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{longtable,booktabs}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}

\title{R Markdown v2 Demo}
\author{Li Lei \\ Han Meimei}
\date{2015/01/01}


\begin{document}
\maketitle

\lipsum


\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{foo-1}
\includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{foo-2}
\caption{Two plots placed side by side.}
\end{figure}


\begin{longtable}[c]{lrrrrrrrrrrr}
\caption{A table of the first 10 rows of the mtcars
data.}\tabularnewline
\toprule
& mpg & cyl & disp & hp & drat & wt & qsec & vs & am & gear &
carb\tabularnewline
\midrule
Mazda RX4 & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.620 & 16.46 & 0 & 1 & 4 &
4\tabularnewline
Mazda RX4 Wag & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.875 & 17.02 & 0 & 1 & 4
& 4\tabularnewline
Datsun 710 & 22.8 & 4 & 108 & 93 & 3.85 & 2.320 & 18.61 & 1 & 1 & 4 &
1\tabularnewline
\bottomrule
\end{longtable}


\begin{table}
\caption{A Tale of Two Tables.}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{rr}
\toprule
Sepal.Length & Sepal.Width\\
\midrule
5.1 & 3.5\\
4.9 & 3.0\\
4.7 & 3.2\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\begin{tabular}{lrrr}
\toprule
  & mpg & cyl & disp\\
\midrule
Mazda RX4 & 21.0 & 6 & 160\\
Mazda RX4 Wag & 21.0 & 6 & 160\\
Datsun 710 & 22.8 & 4 & 108\\
Hornet 4 Drive & 21.4 & 6 & 258\\
Hornet Sportabout & 18.7 & 8 & 360\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\lipsum

\end{document}

Here is a screenshot of the second page of the PDF created from pdflatex:

If I remove the longtable, the text can be correctly broken onto the next page. I wonder what the problem is in this document.

$ pdflatex --version
pdfTeX 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.16 (TeX Live 2015)
kpathsea version 6.2.1
Copyright 2015 Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the pdfTeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the pdfTeX source.
Primary author of pdfTeX: Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
Compiled with libpng 1.6.17; using libpng 1.6.17
Compiled with zlib 1.2.8; using zlib 1.2.8
Compiled with xpdf version 3.04

EDIT (cfr)

Here's a more minimal example demonstrating the same problem. (Could probably be pared down further: I mostly tried to eliminate packages.)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{longtable}
\title{R Markdown v2 Demo}
\author{Li Lei}
\date{2015/01/01}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\lipsum

\begin{figure}
  ab
  \caption{Two plots placed side by side.}
\end{figure}

\begin{longtable}[c]{lrrrrrrrrrrr}
  \caption{A table of the first 10 rows of the mtcars
    data.}\tabularnewline
  \hline
  & mpg & cyl & disp & hp & drat & wt & qsec & vs & am & gear &
  carb\tabularnewline
  \hline
  Mazda RX4 & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.620 & 16.46 & 0 & 1 & 4 &
  4\tabularnewline
  Mazda RX4 Wag & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.875 & 17.02 & 0 & 1 & 4
  & 4\tabularnewline
  Datsun 710 & 22.8 & 4 & 108 & 93 & 3.85 & 2.320 & 18.61 & 1 & 1 & 4 &
  1\tabularnewline
  \hline
\end{longtable}

\begin{table}
  \caption{A Tale of Two Tables.}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{rr}
    \hline
    Sepal.Length & Sepal.Width\\
    \hline
    5.1 & 3.5\\
    4.9 & 3.0\\
    4.7 & 3.2\\
    \hline
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}

\lipsum

\end{document}

Obviously, the spilling into the right margin is expected here as I've not adapted the table to the standard text width. But the spilling into the bottom presumably is not.

Answer 1

In your markdown source code add the \suppressfloats command before the offending floats (tables, figures), and compile with pandoc -f markdown+raw_tex.

Tested on this kantlip.md input

![Two plots placed side by side.](frog.jpg)

\kant[2-3]

\suppressfloats
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{frog}
\includegraphics[width=0.5\linewidth]{frog}
\caption{Two plots placed side by side.}
\end{figure}

\begin{longtable}[c]{lrrrrrrrrrrr}
\caption{A table of the first 10 rows of the mtcars
data.}\tabularnewline
\toprule
& mpg & cyl & disp & hp & drat & wt & qsec & vs & am & gear &
carb\tabularnewline
\midrule
Mazda RX4 & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.620 & 16.46 & 0 & 1 & 4 &
4\tabularnewline
Mazda RX4 Wag & 21.0 & 6 & 160 & 110 & 3.90 & 2.875 & 17.02 & 0 & 1 & 4
& 4\tabularnewline
Datsun 710 & 22.8 & 4 & 108 & 93 & 3.85 & 2.320 & 18.61 & 1 & 1 & 4 &
1\tabularnewline
\bottomrule
\end{longtable}

    Sepal.Length   Sepal.Width
  -------------- -------------
             5.1           3.5
             4.9           3.0
             4.7           3.2

  : A Tale of Two Tables.

\kant[17-19]

and with the kantlip.txt file

\usepackage{kantlipsum}

I compiled this example stating pandoc -Hkantlip.txt -f markdown+raw_tex -o kantlip.pdf kantlip.md.

Answer 2

It seems that you need not the long tables breakable to the pages but your preprocessor uses this marking for all tables. In such case, you can define longtable as normal table. It means, don't load longtable package, i.e don't use \usepackage{longtable} but define this:

\newenvironment{longtable}[2][c]
   {\table[h]
    \bgroup \def\caption##1{\omit\gdef\captiontext{##1}}
    \ifx c#1\centering\fi \ifx l#1\raggedright\fi \ifx r#1\raggedleft\fi
    \tabular{#2}
   }
   {\endtabular
    \egroup
    \ifx\captiontext\undefined \else
       \caption{\captiontext} \global\let\captiontext=\undefined \fi
    \endtable
   }

The problem is that LaTeX's longtable implementation cannot be combined with inserts (floats in LaTeX terminology), because it uses its own special \output routine for buffering.

If you really needs to combine inserts with long tables breakable to the pages then you can be inspired by my implementation of long tables for plain TeX. It works with inserts together because it doesn't use special \output routine. But this is another story, because this isn't LaTeX.

Edit If you need to have the caption before the table, then you can define:

\newenvironment{longtable}[2][c]
   {\table[h]
    \setbox0=\vbox\bgroup \def\caption##1{\omit\gdef\captiontext{##1}}
    \ifx c#1\centering\fi \ifx l#1\raggedright\fi \ifx r#1\raggedleft\fi
    \tabular{#2}
   }
   {\endtabular
    \egroup
    \ifx\captiontext\undefined \else 
       \caption{\captiontext}\par\medskip \global\let\captiontext=\undefined \fi
    \unvbox0 
    \endtable
   }

Answer 3

1.In between longtable \end{table} and \lipsum command use \pagebreak command

2.Use minipage environment as shown below:

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.5 \linewidth}
\begin{tabular*}{0.9 \textwidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}rr}

and

\begin{minipage}[b]{0.5 \linewidth}
\begin{tabular*}{0.9 \textwidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}lrrr} 

and end with \end{tabular*} in both tabular* environments.3. To separate the long table and minipage tables you can use \vspace{2cm} command so that the \lipsum will start on third page. The idea is to separate the table and running matters so as to get the correct page breaks at the bottom.