An approach for positioning a floating object in a workspace of an electronic document is disclosed herein. To accomplish this, the workspace is divided into a plurality of available portions in which floating objects may be positioned. For example, these available portions represent geometrical areas within the workspace that do not include obstacles, such as absolutely positioned objects and other floating objects. The available portions are then evaluated against a plurality of undesirable positioning characteristics in order to determine an optimal position for the floating object within the workspace. The optimal position is then determined to be either a location in the workspace that does not result in any of the undesirable characteristics or, alternatively, a location having the most tolerable of the potentially resultant undesired characteristics.