formattingmulticolspacing
I have been making some notes for a math class in LaTeX and I was wondering if there was a way to disable the automatic vertical spacing. I am writing the document in three columns and it seems to spread some sections over an entire column to fill it. If there is a way to fix this, please help. (Note: I have not made any changed to the default text alignment, this happened automatically.)
The multicol package should solve this problem
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{multicol}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols*}{3}
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[2]
\end{multicols*}
\end{document}
the *-version diables the balancing
Just for comparison, the version without * gives:
And the version with star results in:
AMS alignments box and measure each cell anyway so you can check if the cell height is larger than a strut you can locally increase the strut height.
Code updated to use > instead of < so it opens up big entries not small ones:-)
Also does not do anything on first row to avoid adding space above the display.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{mathtools}% includes amsmath
\makeatletter
\newlength\minalignvsep
\def\align@preamble{%
&\hfil
\setboxz@h{\@lign$\m@th\displaystyle{##}$}%
\ifnum\row@>\@ne
\ifdim\ht\z@>\ht\strutbox@
\dimen@\ht\z@
\advance\dimen@\minalignvsep
\ht\strutbox\dimen@
\fi\fi
\strut@
\ifmeasuring@\savefieldlength@\fi
\set@field
\tabskip\z@skip
&\setboxz@h{\@lign$\m@th\displaystyle{{}##}$}%
\ifnum\row@>\@ne
\ifdim\ht\z@>\ht\strutbox@
\dimen@\ht\z@
\advance\dimen@\minalignvsep
\ht\strutbox@\dimen@
\fi\fi
\strut@
\ifmeasuring@\savefieldlength@\fi
\set@field
\hfil
\tabskip\alignsep@
}
\makeatother
\minalignvsep.15em
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.20\linewidth}
\textbf{Nice}
\begin{align*}
x &= 73 \times 2\\
&= 146
\end{align*}
\end{minipage}%
%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.25\linewidth}
\textbf{Not so nice}
\begin{align*}
x &= \frac{146}{10}\\
&= \frac{73}{5}
\end{align*}
\end{minipage}%
\bigskip\par\noindent
\textbf{Manual Tweak Options:}
\medskip\par\noindent
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.25\linewidth}
\textbf{Tweak jot}
\setlength{\jot}{8pt}% tweak
\begin{align*}
x &= \frac{146}{10}\\
&= \frac{73}{5}
\end{align*}
\end{minipage}%
%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.30\linewidth}
\textbf{Add vertical space}
\begin{align*}
x &= \frac{146}{10}\\[5pt]% tweak
&= \frac{73}{5}
\end{align*}
\end{minipage}%
%
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.30\linewidth}
\textbf{spreadlines}
\begin{spreadlines}{0.8em}% tweak
\begin{align*}
x &= \frac{146}{10}\\
&= \frac{73}{5}
\end{align*}
\end{spreadlines}
\end{minipage}%
\end{document}
Best Answer
As written in the documentation multicol has its own controls for ragged and aligned columns called
\raggedcolumnsand\flushcolumns, the default is the latter. They are applied if a multicols spans several pages, regardless of what the document uses elsewhere (i.e.,\raggedbottomdoes not apply then). It also has controls for handling the last column specially when balancing, seetexdoc multicol.