Extra Space Inserted After Consecutive Floating Environments

Question

When putting two floating environments consecutively inside a paragraph as in the example below, TeX seems to insert an additional space after the last floating environment.

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
There is an additional space before this
\begin{figure}
  \caption{A}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
  \caption{B}
\end{figure}% <--- gets rid of extra space
word.
\end{document}

Adding % after the last figure, gets rid of the extra space.

What is the reason for this?

Answer 1

There are two causes of the additional inter-word space between "this" and "word".

• The first cause is the absence of %, i.e., a comment character, at the end the input line There is an additional space before this.

• The second cause is the absence of % at the end of both \end{figure} lines.

Supplying a % character at the end of the first or third possible location suffices to generate a normal inter-word space. Inserting a % character at the end of all 3 lines gets rid of the inter-word space altogether.

---

Addendum to summarize some of the thoughts contained in the comments:

• In a way, it is your coding choice that needlessly causes the complications (such as extra whitespace), which you then find necessary to fix. IMNSHO, there is no discernible advantage to inputting the floats as

  There is an additional space before this
  \begin{figure}
    \caption{A}
  \end{figure}
  \begin{figure}
    \caption{B}
  \end{figure}
  word.
  

  Instead, as @egreg has already suggested, just enter the material as

  There is an additional space before this word.
  \begin{figure}[ht!]
    \caption{A}
  \end{figure}
  \begin{figure}[ht!]
    \caption{B}
  \end{figure}
  

  if the objective is to keep the floats close to the text that precedes them.

• As @DavidCarlisle has explained in the comments below, the extra inter-word whitespace isn't really the result of LaTeX wantonly putting it there; indeed, it's your oddball coding choice that's creating the extra whitespace issue. While TeX and LaTeX will successfully discard consecutive extra whitespace of the type word word, they weren't set up to ferret out and eliminate needless whitespace of the type word {} () word, where {} forms an empty group.

• The upshot: Either get into the habit of adding % after each instance of \end{figure}, or start coding more sensibly so that the whitespace issue discussed in this posting never even arises.