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I'm autogenerating a book using pandoc, meaning pandoc parses markdown-formatted text and runs it through xelatex with it's own template. I have a problem where I need to have a short text after the chapter title in one column before starting the two-column main text. Because of pandoc-induced limitations, I can't use multicol. Instead the document is a twocolumn-memoir.

Currently, I use minipage to set the text after the chapter heading, but I am having a problem where the second column is overlapping the minipage instead of starting after the minipage like the first column.

A suggested solution requires defining the first paragraph before the chapter heading, which messes up how pandoc handles the text. Is there a way to fix the problem some other way? The solution doesn't need to use minipage, but pandoc limits some options because of how it parses text.

A minimal example of how I currently generate the text:

\documentclass[landscape,twocolumn,oneside,12pt]{memoir}
\begin{document}

\chapter{Chapter Title}

\begin{minipage}[c]{\textwidth}
\centering
Author info
with several lines of
text
\end{minipage}

\subsubsection{Left column}
Left column text which is usually much longer than this example.

\vfill\break % break text to next column

\subsubsection{Right column}
Right column also usually has a much longer text.

\clearpage
krax
  • 93

1 Answers1

2

You can use the strip environment, from cuted (sttools bundle). The envirronment inserts at the beginning and end a vertical spacing of \stripsep (default: 15pt±2pt):

\documentclass[landscape,twocolumn,oneside,12pt]{memoir}

\usepackage{cuted}

\begin{document}

\chapter{Chapter Title}

\begin{strip}%
\centering
Author info
with several lines of
text\vspace{6ex}
\end{strip}
\subsubsection{Left column}
Left column text which is usually much longer than this example.

\vfill\break % break text to next column

\subsubsection{Right column}
Right column also usually has a much longer text.

\clearpage

\end{document}

enter image description here

Bernard
  • 271,350
  • Excellent suggestion that seemed very promising. But when I tried it, anything inside the strip environment OR after the chapter title and before the actual text (i.e. not inside the environment at all) is removed from the document and all the document bookmarks are also destroyed. – krax Nov 01 '16 at 13:07
  • Strange… Could you post a minimal example? – Bernard Nov 01 '16 at 13:53
  • I just replaced the minipage with strip (copy-pasteing from your example) and added cuted package to the beginning. My actual template is more complex, so there might be some interference from other packages. – krax Nov 01 '16 at 14:21
  • Here is a gist of the actual templates. – krax Nov 01 '16 at 14:33
  • I managed to figure out that adding the cuted-package later in the template fixed some of the interference. Thanks for the help! – krax Nov 02 '16 at 08:26