[Tex/LaTex] Long bottom figure float disappears in twocolumn article with stfloats

floats

This is my MWE:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{stfloats}
\begin{document}
Figure \ref{figure}
\begin{figure}%[b]
    \vspace*{15\baselineskip}
    \caption{This is the figure!}
    \label{figure}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

You will note that the compiled document does not show the figure float as soon as you uncomment [b]. Removing stfloats, or changing [b] to something else, or changing 15 to 10, makes the float re-appear, so this must be a very special case. Still, is this known or expected from stfloats? Or is this my fault in doing things the wrong way?

Note that this is fairly well reduced from the original MWE: no IEEEtran, no graphicx, no subfloat, no \includegraphics, no \subfloat.

I am using newest MiKTeX on Windows with pdflatex, which creates a letter-paper sized pdf file. My version of sttools (which provides stfloats) is 1.8, dated 2016-02-12 15:45:58. stfloats.sty has

\ProvidesPackage{stfloats}
    [2016/02/08 v2.0 Improve float mechanism and baselineskip settings]

I could not reproduce the error on sharelatex.com, which uses

Package: stfloats 2012/05/29 v1.1 Improve float mechanism and baselineskip settings

Best Answer

I can confirm that stfloats contains a bug with latest latexrelease. The bugfix version (2016-06-28 v3.2) is just uploaded to the CTAN as part of sttools bundle (2016-06-28 v1.9).

By the way, keep in mind that maximum proportion (as a decimal number) of a text page or column that can be occupied by floats at the bottom \bottomfraction is .3, as at the top \topfraction it is .7

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