1

I am new to TeX, but I cannot find a solution to my problem anywhere.

I have some text in two columns just after a page wide image (and this is not a problem).

But I would like to add a little table (a sort of a legend, maybe a minipage?) on the top of the right column, as wide as a column.

Is there a way to do it? Any suggestion about the packages I should look for?

Thanks in advance, Fabio

Fabio
  • 19
  • you have tagged the question multicol but that doesn't support floats, are you using multicol or the [twocolumn] document option? In the later case the easiest thing is to have a table environment following the table* to hold the legend, it may need a bit of manual adjustment of its position in the source file to ensure it floats to the second column. – David Carlisle Sep 29 '14 at 20:42
  • Yes, I am trying to use multicol because it doesn't force me to start a new page each time I switch from one to two columns. – Fabio Sep 30 '14 at 09:52

2 Answers2

3

LaTeX doesn't automatically keep the floats together so you have to be careful where you place them in the source but:

enter image description here

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}

\def\a{One two three four five six. }
\def\b{\a\a\par Red green blue. \a\a\a\par Yellow black \a\a\a\a}
\def\c{Something \b \b More text here \b\b}
\begin{document}

\c\c\c

\begin{table*}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|r|}
\hline
aaa aa aa aaa a a a aaaaaaaaa&1&bbbbbbbbbbbbbb\\
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa&1&bbbb\\
aaaaaaaaaaa&1234567890&bbbbb b b b b bbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbb\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}

\c\c\c

\begin{table}
\raggedright\itshape
Some interesting text about the above table.
Some more interesting text about the above table.
Yet more interesting text about the above table.
\end{table}
\c\c\c\c\c\c
\c\c\c\c\c\c\c

\end{document}
David Carlisle
  • 757,742
  • Thanks David. Unfortunately it looks like that the position of the second table depends on the length of the text between the two tables. The perfect solution for me would be to place the top figure and the legend with an absolute position and then wrap the text around. – Fabio Sep 30 '14 at 09:49
  • @Fabio unfortunately the world isn't always perfect:-) – David Carlisle Sep 30 '14 at 09:54
2

Out of the box multicol doesn't support floats as David explained due to the fact that it needs to do balancing and that means it is not quite known where material is going to fall.

However if you know that you want a column float on a particular page in a particular column (in other words you are doing something somewhat manual) then my answer in

Placing figures inside a two-column document

may offer you a solution.

As an alternative you may want to look into applying the flowfram package. Again that will require manual setup for your document but it will allow you great control over the result.

Community
  • 1
Frank Mittelbach
  • 77,146