How to enforce the position of table* (wide table)

Question

I'm writing a paper using SIGPLAN conference 2 columns format. I maintain separate .tex files per each chapters:

%% main.tex    
\documentclass[preprint, 10pt]{sigplanconf}
\usepackage{ ... }
...
\maketitle
...
\input{abstract}
\input{intro}
\input{related}
...

'abstract' and 'intro' together has 1.2 page long, and 'related' follows then. The length of 'related' is 0.8 page long. That means all contents until 'related are in page 2.

The problem is that I have a wide table, {table*} that spans two columns in the 'related' file.

%% related.tex
\begin{table*}[t]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
...
\end{table*}

However, this wide table is always located at page 3, not page 2. To make this wide table to be page 2, I need to move the table into the middle of 'intro', which is very ugly. Even worse, this can make the table caption numbers to be out of order.

Is there any way to enforce the location of a wide table? In my case, I want to draw the wide table at page 2.

I came across fixltx2e package, but inserting this package just makes huge errors on {table*} and {figure*}.

Answer 1

I have two suggestions. First, replace the \begin{center} and \end{center} commands with the single instruction \centering. This will shrink the vertical space required by the entire table quite noticeably. Second, place the code of the table in a file by itself, and \input that file immediately after the abstract but before the intro file.

In the following MWE, I'm using the article documentclass instead of sigplanconf (which isn't on my TeX system), and I'm using filler text from the lipsum package to simulate the contents of the abstract and the first two sections. Notice that the code for the table comes before the start of section 1; as a result, it gets placed at the top of page 2, which I believe is what you want. (In twocolumn LaTeX documents, floats will only be placed at the top, hence it's unnecessary, and useless, to provide the [t] positioning option.) Happy TeXing!

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,afterpage}
\begin{document}
\begin{abstract}
\lipsum[1-2]
\end{abstract}

\begin{table*}
\caption{Some data points} \label{tab:data}
\medskip
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|ccccc|}
\hline
a & b & c & d & e\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}

\section{Introduction}
\lipsum[3-8]

\section{Related Literature}
\lipsum[8-15]

\end{document}

Answer 2

You can do this using the stfloats package and then use the normal notation such as [bp] to place the image on the bottom.

\usepackage{stfloats}
\begin{table*}[bp]
...
\end{table*}

Answer 3

Another solution is to use the [h] (for "here") modifier.

\begin{table*}[h]
   \centering
   \begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
      ...
\end{table*}