I would like to add a fixed content (produced by e.g. \parbox) at the top of every column of a multicols* environment. How can I do this? The optional argument of multicols* is only added on the first page and covers all columns – I need it on every page and every column. Using a table package like longtable could be a solution but I haven't found a multipage tabular package that works well with multicol.
[Tex/LaTex] column header for multicols
multicol
Related Solutions
The workaround you pointed to for single-column floats is a very crude one - the new environments simply don't float, which will almost invariably lead to bad column breaks without manual intervention. Footnotes are a kind of special floats, and an equivalent "workaround" would be to place text formatted akin to footnotes at the bottom of the affected columns by hand (and to determine column breaks by hand).
Quoting from p. 12 of the multicol documentation:
I'm not sure that I really want pagewide footnotes. But balancing of the last page can only be achieved with this approach or with a multi-path algorithm which is complicated and slow. But it's a challenge to everybody to prove me wrong! Another possibility is to reimplement a small part of the
fire_upprocedure in TeX (the program). I think that this is the best solution if you are interested in complex page makeup, but it has the disadvantage that the resulting program cannot be called TeX thereafter.
So I'm afraid there's no workaround for your problem.
It's possible to trick supertabular to work inside a multicols environment by redefining \newpage to be \columnbreak in the first column and \newpage in the second. I also needed to stick a height 0, width \linewidth rule at the bottom of the first column. Strange things happen without it.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{xcolor,supertabular,multicol}
\newcount\n
\n=0
\def\tablebody{}
\makeatletter
\loop\ifnum\n<300
\advance\n by1
\protected@edef\tablebody{\tablebody
\textbf{\number\n.}&
\hfill T\hfill\hfill F\hfill\hskip0pt\endgraf
\vskip.5\baselineskip
\color@begingroup
\color{black!20}
\hrule height3ex
\color@endgroup
\tabularnewline
}
\repeat
\makeatother
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols*}{2}
\let\mcnewpage=\newpage
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\newpage{%
\if@firstcolumn
\hrule width\linewidth height0pt
\columnbreak
\else
\mcnewpage
\fi
}
\makeatother
\tablehead{Item \#&\\}
\begin{supertabular}{lp{1.5in}}
\tablebody
\end{supertabular}
\end{multicols*}
\end{document}
I'm not actually sure that this is the best way to generate the body, but it works.
Best Answer
You don't provide a minimal example, so I hope to get away by reminding you on this:
multicolumn long table or enumeration
As far as I understand your question, you could use
\tableheadof supertabular to print your »fixed content«.