How do I separate blocks of different height multicolumns and have separate columns below one another?

Question

I am trying to start a small newspaper, and have tried doing it in Latex.

So far I've made use of the helpful newspaper package for headline and byline macros, as well as the title creation.

Additionally, I've experimented with multicols, graphicx, and picinpar packages, but they do not suffice.

The following is quite a nasty, but comprehensive example of the kinds of things I would like to do:

I have no need for the more complicated text shapes present (like columns folding over another partially). But how would one have related paragraphs in their own two columns or more below other columns of text. As opposed to the way multicols or multicols* function, having paragraph text keep going until the page height is filled?

Additionally how would one have a single paragraph span the width of two columns as one?

Answer 1

flowframe

Have a look at Nicola Talbot’s package flowframe. She has even made a drawing program jpgfdraw, which can be used to construct flowframe-pages. flowframe can link text between different frame (cf. your next to last question)

textpos

If this is not suitable, you may try to build up the page using the package textpos. This is a very advanced package, and I am pretty sure that you will be able to typeset a newspaper with it. You can build a page by stacking textboxes around. Inside the textboxes, you may use multicol:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{textpos}
\TPGrid[40mm,20mm]{10}{5}

\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{textblock*}{5cm}(4cm,4cm)
\begin{multicols}{2}

Mul­ti­col de­fines a mul­ti­cols en­vi­ron­ment which type­sets text in mul­ti­ple columns (up to a max­i­mum of 10), and (by de­fault) bal­ances the end of each column at the end of the en­vi­ron­ment. The pack­age en­ables you to switch be­tween any (per­mit­ted) num­ber of columns at will: there is no im­posed "clear page" op­er­a­tion, as there is in un­adorned LaTeX at a switch be­tween onecol­umn and twocol­umn sec­tions. The mul­ti­col­umn en­vi­ron­ment can also be used in­side a box, thus al­low­ing mul­ti­columned in­sets in text.

Mul­ti­col patches the out­put rou­tine, and may clash with other pack­ages that do the same (e.g., longtable); fur­ther­more, there is no pro­vi­sion for sin­gle col­umn floats in­side a mul­ti­col­umn en­vi­ron­ment, so fig­ures and ta­bles must be coded in-line (us­ing, for ex­am­ple, the H mod­i­fier of the float pack­age).

The pack­age is part of the la­tex-tools bun­dle in the LaTeX re­quired dis­tri­bu­tion. 

\end{multicols}
\end{textblock*}

\end{document}

minipage

A third solution is to build the page using minipages with multicol inside:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}

\begin{document}

\noindent\begin{minipage}[b]{5cm}
\raggedleft
\begin{multicols}{2}

Mul­ti­col de­fines a mul­ti­cols en­vi­ron­ment which type­sets text in mul­ti­ple columns (up to a max­i­mum of 10), and (by de­fault) bal­ances the end of each column at the end of the en­vi­ron­ment. The pack­age en­ables you to switch be­tween any (per­mit­ted) num­ber of columns at will: there is no im­posed "clear page" op­er­a­tion, as there is in un­adorned LaTeX at a switch be­tween onecol­umn and twocol­umn sec­tions. The mul­ti­col­umn en­vi­ron­ment can also be used in­side a box, thus al­low­ing mul­ti­columned in­sets in text.

Mul­ti­col patches the out­put rou­tine, and may clash with other pack­ages that do the same (e.g., longtable); fur­ther­more, there is no pro­vi­sion for sin­gle col­umn floats in­side a mul­ti­col­umn en­vi­ron­ment, so fig­ures and ta­bles must be coded in-line (us­ing, for ex­am­ple, the H mod­i­fier of the float pack­age).

The pack­age is part of the la­tex-tools bun­dle in the LaTeX re­quired dis­tri­bu­tion. 

\end{multicols}
\end{minipage}\strut

\end{document}

That said, LaTex is not the best solution for typesetting newspapers.