One figure at the top of each column in twocolumn article

Question

I have a two-column article with many figures, which work out to a little less than 1 figure per column over all pages. In the text, some of the figures are mentioned in bunches, so that a naive placement ends up having pages with any number of figures in each column.

Is it possible to constrain the layout such that at most one figure is allowed at the top of each column?

I do not care where a given figure ends up being placed.

I am currently distributing the figures by hand, but that is very fragile. In fact, I already need to maintain two placement schemes for slightly different typesetting.

I cannot put two figures each in a full-width minipage, since graphics and captions can have ungainly differences in height.

Please add a minimal working example to your question so users can reproduce your problem. — samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz, Oct 19 '22 at 13:19
@DavidCarlisle Perfect, thank you. The combination of \setcounter{topnumber}{1}, \setcounter{bottomnumber}{0}, and \setcounter{totalnumber}{1} has fixed my problem right away. I get some warnings that floats are stuck, but I cannot see any negative effect from that.
Care to write up an answer so I can accept it? — ntessore, Oct 19 '22 at 13:42
Or just use \begin{figure}[t]. BTW, totalnumber has more to do with [h] floats. — John Kormylo, Oct 19 '22 at 14:51

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 19 '22 at 13:49

1

If you set

\setcounter{topnumber}{1}

Only one float will appear at the top of a column.

You can set the other values to 0 such as

\setcounter{bottomnumber}{0}

or set \def\fps@figure{t}so only top floats are considered for \begin{figure} unless other areas added by the optional argument such as [p]

answered Oct 19 '22 at 13:49

David Carlisle

757,742

Thanks to this answer, I found this great other answer, which also points out dbltopnumber among other useful things. – ntessore Oct 19 '22 at 13:57
1

oh yes Frank's opus, but referencing that is more like "read the manual" than answering a specific question (source2e.pdf also has this information in principle of course) – David Carlisle Oct 19 '22 at 14:00

One figure at the top of each column in twocolumn article

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