Academic publishing: advanced questions about figure/table positioning I am writing a textbook and am in the process of making final adjustments, such as the positioning of figures and tables.
I know the basics: figures and tables need to be at the top or bottom of the page. However, I'm concerned about fine-tuning. I have three questions:

figures are always at the top, which makes sense because captions are below the figure and captions are very close to the text. However, does this mean that tables should be at the bottom? The captions are above the tables and if you put the tables at the bottom, the captions are closer to the text.



what is the best styling in the situation where you have two unrelated figures on the same page? From a contextual perspective, one should be at the top and the other at the bottom because they are unrelated. But from a caption perspective, they should both be on top, since the caption is closer to the text in this case.



what is the best styling when the page is divided by a new section and the figure belongs to the new section? From the contextual perspective, the figure should be at the bottom because it belongs to the bottom section. However, from the caption perspective, the figure should be at the top because the caption is closer to the text in this case.


Do you have any ideas for this situation?
The simple answer is that it doesn't really matter, as long as you're consistent about how you do it.
If you stick with the LaTeX defaults, the figure will always go to the top of each page, and that's a perfectly reasonable convention. If you shift to placing things &quot;nearest&quot;, that's fine as well, but will take more care on your part, since it's easy to end up with unexpected shifts caused by distant upstream changes.