MAINT: Address reviewer comments

Closes pandas-devgh-14484
Closes pandas-devgh-17499

Author: gfyoung

doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.1.txt

@@ -120,6 +120,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_msgpack` when serializing data of the numpy.bool_ datatype (:issue:`18390`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_json` not decoding when reading line deliminted JSON from S3 (:issue:`17200`)
 - Bug in :func:`pandas.io.json.json_normalize` to avoid modification of ``meta`` (:issue:`18610`)
+- Bug in :func:`to_latex` where repeated multi-index values were not printed even though a higher level index differed from the previous row (:issue:`14484`)
 
 Plotting
 ^^^^^^^^

pandas/tests/io/formats/test_to_latex.py

@@ -221,13 +221,14 @@ def test_to_latex_multiindex(self):
 
         assert result == expected
 
-        # GH 14484
+    def test_to_latex_multiindex_dupe_level(self):
+        # see gh-14484
+        #
         # If an index is repeated in subsequent rows, it should be
-        # replaced with a blank in the created table.
-        # This should ONLY happen if all higher order indicies
-        # (to the left) are equal, too.
-        # In this test, 'c' has to be printed both times, because
-        # the higher order index 'A' != 'B'
+        # replaced with a blank in the created table. This should
+        # ONLY happen if all higher order indices (to the left) are
+        # equal too. In this test, 'c' has to be printed both times
+        # because the higher order index 'A' != 'B'.
         df = pd.DataFrame(index=pd.MultiIndex.from_tuples(
             [('A', 'c'), ('B', 'c')]), columns=['col'])
         result = df.to_latex()
@@ -240,7 +241,6 @@ def test_to_latex_multiindex(self):
 \bottomrule
 \end{tabular}
 """
-
         assert result == expected
 
     def test_to_latex_multicolumnrow(self):