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I have a very large equation of the form

 \begin{align}

   I(a,b) &= \int_{[a,b]} x^d\lambda (x) \\

          &= \frac{1}{10^b a!}\int_{[a,b]} x^6\lambda (x) 

\end{align}

The only difference is, my equation does not only have one line under the top equation but about 10. The thing is that my TeX program always wants that all these equations appear on one page. This is of course problematic, because the preceding page looks very stretched and almost empty cause I waste that much space. Therefore I want that it should be possible that this equation is written over two pages. How can I do this?

Przemysław Scherwentke
  • 37,268

1 Answers1

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How about putting the whole thing into a figure (one-column document) or figure* environment (two-column document)? I.e., you could do something like: 

\begin{figure}%
\begin{align}
I(a,b) &= \int_{[a,b]} x^d\lambda (x) \\
       &= \frac{1}{10^b a!}\int_{[a,b]} x^6\lambda (x) 
\end{align}
\end{figure}%

Your equation would float, so it would not page-break but still you would not get some ugly half-empty page. Since you do not call \caption, the figure counter would not be affected.

(I wanted to post that as a comment, but comments cannot contain code listings.)

Thomas Weise
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  • You may have misunderstood the OP's intent: It's not to keep the entire align material on one page, but to allow a page break. – Mico Jul 15 '15 at 10:48
  • But this would alleviate the need for a page break, while not being affected by future changes of the document in front of his equation? (As said, I wanted to do that as mere comment first, anyway) – Thomas Weise Jul 15 '15 at 10:50
  • As I see it, it's the lack of a suitable page break that's the problem. Putting the material inside a float will likely create a whole new set of problems, right? Issuing the instruction \allowdisplaybreaks, as suggested in a comment by David Carlisle, solved the OP's problem. – Mico Jul 15 '15 at 10:53
  • Yes, you are right, Prof. Carlisle's answer is the right one. Using figure, however, has some advantages in shorter documents, say research papers. The equation will be laid out somewhere nearby as a whole, without disturbing the flow of the paper. Still, I should probably not have added this idea. – Thomas Weise Jul 15 '15 at 11:36