How to stop bookdown tables from floating to bottom of the page in pdf?

Question

I am using bookdown to create pdf reports, but my tables are all floating down to the bottom of the page, regardless of how much space there is. See this example:

---
title: "test_doc"
author: "Jake Thompson"
date: "6/30/2017"
output:
  bookdown::pdf_document2:
    toc: false
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE, collapse = TRUE)
library(tidyverse)
```

# Test heading

Let make a data frame and print it in Table \@ref(tab:test-table)

```{r test-table}
data_frame(col_a = seq_len(5), col_b = rnorm(5), col_c = runif(5)) %>%
  knitr::kable(caption = "This is a test")
```

The resulting pdf looks like this:

Why does the table go to the bottom of the page? And is there a way to prevent this behavior?

Answer 1

You can solve this problem with kableExtra by

data_frame(col_a = seq_len(5), col_b = rnorm(5), col_c = runif(5)) %>%
  knitr::kable(caption = "This is a test") %>%
  kableExtra::kable_styling(latex_options = "hold_position")

It basically insert a [!h] to the LaTeX table environment which will prevent the floating behavior and pin the table at current location.

Answer 2

I had to use

kable_styling(latex_options = "HOLD_position")

Note the uppercase HOLD_position, different from hold_position. See also here.

To be able to use that, I also had to add to the top section of the doc (from How to build a latex kable through bookdown::render_book?):

output:
  pdf_document:
    extra_dependencies: ["float"]