Placing two-column floats at bottom of page

You specified placement ‘[htbp]’ for your full-width figure or table, but they always get placed at the top of the page… Well, it is what the documentation says: LaTeX, unadorned, only allows full-width floats at the top of a page, or occupying (part of) a float page.

The stfloats package ameliorates the situation somewhat, and makes LaTeX honour ‘[b]’ placement as well; the dblfloatfix package combines a tidied version of the changes made in stfloats with the float ordering corrections defined in fixltx2e.

A particular problem with stfloats and dblfloatfix is that the float will appear, at its earliest, on the page after it is specified. This has two undesirable side-effects: first, there may be no bottom float on the first page of a document, and second, float numbers may become “entangled” (particularly if you’re using dblfloatfix that ensures that the early-specified bottom float is set before any single column floats).

(The FAQ team doesn’t know of any package that will make LaTeX honour ‘[h]’ placement of double-column floats, but the midfloat package can be pressed into service to provide something approximating the effect it would have.)

dblfloatfix.sty
dblfloatfix
midfloat.sty
Distributed as part of sttools
stfloats.sty
Distributed as part of sttools