Balance columns in all document

Question

In IEEE documents all the columns are balanced. Is it posible to achieve this in an article class?.

I used the multicol, flushend and balance packages but these not works fine for me — Andres Sarmiento C, Dec 23 '12 at 03:24
Andres, it would be really nice if you accepted the most helpful answers to your old questions. See how to accept an answer — Vivi, Dec 23 '12 at 04:53
The more I look at the question (and what the IEEE document classes do) the more I believe the answer to the question is simply: use \flushcolumns with the standard article class. — Frank Mittelbach, Aug 25 '13 at 20:40
Worth to note that \flushcolumns is simple, but using the multicol package. for newbies trying this with a standard twocolumn article will be only a frustrating undefined control sequence. — Fran, Nov 05 '18 at 23:31

Fran · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-23T02:16:06.113

In addition to commented multicols or balance packages and others as vwcol (this for a single page), may be a simpler method is the package flushend

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{flushend} %balanced columns
\usepackage{lipsum} % dummy text
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-10] 
\end{document}

Another option, that could be problematic when using floats and enunciations (theorem, lemma, etc,) is set the fontsize, baseline and lines per page in the whole document with the grid package to fill the empty space of the last page or fit the text to n-1 pages.

For example, in this MWE with a single short column in the third page can be converted to a document with two or tree pages with no empty spaces:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
% for a 2 pages document uncomment this
%\usepackage[fontsize=10pt,baseline=12pt,lines=51]{grid} 
% for a 3 pages document uncomment this
% \usepackage[fontsize=11pt,baseline=14pt,lines=35]{grid}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-16]
\end{document}

Balance columns in all document

1 Answers1