Footnotes in tables

If your table is floating, your best bet is (unfortunately) to put the table in a minipage environment and to put the notes underneath the table, or to use Donald Arseneau's package macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/threeparttable.sty

Otherwise, if your table is not floating (it's just a `tabular' in the middle of some text), there are several things you can do to fix the problem.

1. Use \footnotemark to position the little marker appropriately, and then put in \footnotetext commands to fill in the text once you've closed the tabular environment. This is described in Lamport's book, but it gets messy if there's more than one footnote.
2. Stick the table in a minipage anyway. This provides all the ugliness of footnotes in a minipage with no extra effort.
3. Use macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/threeparttable.sty anyway; the package is intended for floating tables, and the result might look odd if the table is not floating, but it will be reasonable.
4. Use tabularx or longtable from the LaTeX tools distribution (macros/latex/packages/tools); they're noticeably less efficient than the standard tabular environment, but they do allow footnotes.
5. Grab hold of footnote.sty from CTAN, lurking in macros/latex/contrib/supported/mdwtools

   Then put your tabular environment inside a savenotes environment. Alternatively, say \makesavenoteenv{tabular} in the preamble of your document, and tables will all handle footnotes correctly.

6. Use mdwtab.sty from the same directory (macros/latex/contrib/supported/mdwtools).

   This will handle footnotes properly, and has other facilities to increase the beauty of your tables. It may also cause other table-related packages (not the standard `tools' ones, though) to become very unhappy and stop working.