I've googled, and I read a lot about how not having a pagebreak before a new chapter
is bad style. I've read about how one could use sections instead. I've read about how changing whether a chapter begins on a new page or not within a document is even worse, from a style standpoint.
However, if I still have to do it somehow, typographic style be damned, and I have to do it in a twocolumn
document…
Background: I am translating a set of gaming rulebooks into a single scrbook
, with each original rulebook represented by a part
in my scrbook
. Layout of the rulebooks is relatively uniform, with fancy chapter headings beginning on a new page each.
The exception to this is the first rulebook / part
, which has very short chapters, sometimes several on a single page, but following the same numbering scheme as the more elaborate chapters in the other rulebooks / part
s.
I could typeset that first book seperately, using sections instead of chapters, and include
the resulting PDF. That way, I would lose the common TOC / LOT / index, which would be unfortunate.
I could wing it by redefining header formats for the first part, to make sections "look" like chapters and subsections look like sections and subsubsections… and so on. Pretty heavy-handed.
Edit: The solution in Start new chapter on same page (using etoolbox
to patch the clearpage
/ cleardoublepage
out of the definition of \chapter
) does not work for a twocolumn
document, yielding "Float(s) lost" errors. (I hadn't mentioned the twocolumn
detail before as I did not think it would make a difference.) User lockstep asked for a seperate question; instead, I vote for re-opening this (edited) one.
tl;dr:
Is there a way to tell LaTeX not to put a pagebreak for \chapter
in a twocolumn
document?
Best Answer
As switching between
twocolumn
andonecolumn
causes a page break, one may use themulticol
package and itsmulticols
environment instead. (The environment's optional argument is used for introductory one-column material.) In the following example, I use thetwocolumn
class option to achieve smaller margins, then temporarily switch two\onecolumn
at the start of the document. Page breaks before chapters are removed by disabling\clearpage
inside a group.Note: The vertical space before chapter 1 (typeset with
multicols
) is actually larger than the space before chapter 3 (typeset with\twocolumn
). The larger space is caused by LaTeX bug 3126 (\twocolumn
interfering with\topskip
); for consistent spacing, usemulticols
environments for every chapter of your document. EDIT: Even better, use Frank Mittelbachs answer to Is it possible to define a `multicols{2}` preamble switch that works for \chapter?