[XeTeX] Floated tables below footnotes

[Martin Steer]

maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu writes:

> We're using the Covington macros
> (http://www.ai.uga.edu/ftplib/tex/covington.pdf). We don't like the
> way the interlinear examples (which are 4-5 lines high) can get split
> over page boundaries. While it would be possible to insert
> \nopagebreak cmds between each line of interlinear text, it seemed
> simpler to bracket the entire interlinear text with something that
> would prevent a page break.
>
> So I tried a \begin{table}...\end{table} command.  This works, in the
> sense that if an example is too large to fit on a page, it floats to the
> next page.  But there are some oddities with it, the oddest of which is
> that the example can wind up *below* the footnotes on a page.  Obviously
> when this happens there is no issue with fitting the example on the page,
> because it *is* on the same page.
>
> So my questions are:
> 1) Why would a "table" get floated below a footnote?
> 2) Will this happen with other tables?
> 3) Is there a better way to prevent page breaks in the middle of
> interlinear examples?

I don't think that using a float is a good approach to this kind of
problem. Floats are awkward beasts, which are better kept for lumpish
material which is difficult to integrate into the flow of the text.

Covington and similar macros set the aligned part of your example in a
box, which won't break across pages. The page break, if it occurs,
separates the translation from the rest.

There is a patched version of gb4e which is a partial solution to the
problem. gb4e itself is a glossing macro derived from covington, and is
available on CTAN.

The following site provides a little discussion and some links.

<http://osdir.com/ml/tex.linguistics/2006-12/msg00066.html>

> 4) Is there a better forum to ask this question on?

Probably the best place to ask linguistics-related tex questions is the
ling-tex list:

<http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~dag/ling-tex.html>

--
Martin