Footnotes for tables in LaTeX

This is a classic difficulty in LaTeX.

The problem is how to do layout with floats (figures and tables, an similar objects) and footnotes. In particular, it is hard to pick a place for a float with certainty that making room for the associated footnotes won’t cause trouble. So the standard tabular and figure environments don’t even try.

What can you do:

1. Fake it. Just put a hardcoded vertical skip at the bottom of the caption and then write the footnote yourself (use \footnotesize for the size). You also have to manage the symbols or number yourself with \footnotemark. Simple, but not very attractive, and the footnote does not appear at the bottom of the page.
2. Use the tabularx, longtable, threeparttable[x] (kudos to Joseph) or ctable which support this behavior.
3. Manage it by hand. Use [h!] (or [H] with the float package) to control where the float will appear, and \footnotetext on the same page to put the footnote where you want it. Again, use \footnotemark to install the symbol. Fragile and requires hand-tooling every instance.
4. The footnote package provides the savenote environment, which can be used to do this.
5. Minipage it (code stolen outright, and read the disclaimer about long caption texts in that case):

    \begin{figure}
      \begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
        ...
        \caption[Caption for LOF]%
          {Real caption\footnote{blah}}
      \end{minipage}
    \end{figure}

Additional reference: TeX FAQ item Footnotes in tables.