How to solve LaTeX Error: Too many unprocessed floats

I have already posted about my problem with too many floats in LaTeX. Consider that I have already written my figures (a kind of floats) in this way:

\begin{figure}[htbp]
% content
\end{figure}

and applied the package morefloats. But these are only patches, not really solutions. In the Lamport’s LaTeX book (1994 edition), at page 143-144, it is written

main memory size. This is one kind of space that TeX can run out when processiong a short file. There are three ways you can run TEX out of main memory space: [...] (3) creating so complicated a page of output that TEX can’t hold all the information needed to generate it. [...]

The third problem is nastier. It can be caused by large tabbing, tabular,array and picture environments. (…) To find out if you’ve really exceeded TeX’s capacity in this way, put a \clearpage command in your input file right before the place where TeX ran out of room and try running it again. If it doesn’t run out of room with the \clearpage command there, then you did exceed TeX’s capacity. If it sill runs out of room, then there’s probably an error in your file.

It seems that there isn’t an error in my file, as \clearpage did the work! Many thanks toMarco Benini for giving the solving hint.

Another way around, is trying to group together many figures in one figure, adding the\usepackage{subfig}, described in Chapter 6 of the grimoire (6.5.2, 315-321). So there are less floats to manage for TeX’s engine.

I will describe my experience with subfig in a next post.

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