[XeTeX] Floated tables below footnotes

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

This is undoubtedly the wrong place to ask this question, but since it's
the only LaTeX-like mailing list I'm on, I'll start here and you can
re-direct me.

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

It's probably not relevant, but these examples do contain Urdu text, using
a Nasta'liq Arabic font which can take up considerably more vertical space
than they would if everything was Roman text.

Finally, if this doesn't make sense, I can probably create a minimal test
case.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD