On the following example, a footnote is defined near the top of page 1, but in the PDF file generated by pdflatex, it appears on page 2, while it could have been put on page 1. Note that both floating tables are important.
Why is the footnote not positioned on the page where it is defined (there is the room for that)? Is this regarded as a bug?
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text\footnote{Footnote.}
\[x\]
Text text text text text text text text text text text
\[x\]
\vspace*{370pt}
Text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text
\begin{table}
\caption{Text}
\end{table}
\begin{table}
\caption{Text}
\end{table}
Text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text text
\end{document}
Best Answer
You should never have a blank line before a display equation it creates an anomolous white line (not vertical space) that is not wanted above the display and is not discarded at a page break.
Although even without that the specified space does not allow a footnote on page 1. there are two problems, to make it fit you have to take a single line of the paragraph over a page, and normally LaTeX tries to avoid doing this (
\widowpenalty) secondly as there is not enough stretch space on the page to make up for the difference in line heights.If you make TeX prefer rather than avoid widow lines then it fits (I don't recommend doing this, but to demonstrate the effect)