marginstwo-column
Sometimes I find that floats don't fit nicely on a page, so I use
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{ <blah blah blah> }
so that the borders match the margins. However, I'm now working on a paper in two-column format (specifically using sigplanconf.cls) and if I use the above command, it stretches the table over both columns.
Is there a way I can find the "proper" \textwidth? As in, a variable that describes the width of a single column.
The best solution is to use the class file provided by the publisher of the journal to which you intend to submit the paper. Ie, use revtex for APS and AIP journals, elsarticle for Elsevier and so on.
You need not worry about making the paper look perfect: this is the job of the copyeditors employed by the journal (or working for a copyediting company in, eg, India). In fact, by doing any latex hacking you are generally making things more difficult for the publisher because such things can interfere with the publisher's automated workflow and require additional manual intervention (and therefore delay publication of your article). Many publishers thus refuse to accept manuscripts that use any kind fancy tex. For example, APS forbids use of \def, \gdef, \edef as well as \if, \footnotemark, creation or modification of tex counters, \newfont, \symbol, generalized lists (\begin{list}), amsmath commands \genfrac, \smash and many others. They allow certain other constructs but warn that they will likely be ignored in production, such as \labelstyle and \tabbing.
Since I battled with this a while as well and I couldn't find any helpful discussions on the web, I just read carefully the manual! Maybe this is a feature newer than this topic, so it wasn't around the days the question was asked. But I like to provide an easy way to achieve multiple columns with the glossaries package so that others might find a solution faster.
One only needs the additional glossary-mcols package which provides exactly that.
\documentclass{scrreprt}
\usepackage{glossaries}
\usepackage{glossary-mcols}
\makeglossaries
\renewcommand*{\glspostdescription}{} % Removes dots at the end of each entry.
\begin{document}
% Some entries.
\newglossaryentry{glos:begin}{name=Begin, description={This is the beginning.}}
\newglossaryentry{glos:bold}{name=Bold, description=\nopostdesc}
\newglossaryentry{glos:bear}{name=Bear, description={A bear can make you run fast.}}\newglossaryentry{glos:chicken}{name=Chicken, description={Tasty...}}
\newglossaryentry{glos:elephant}{name=Elephant, description=\nopostdesc}
\newglossaryentry{glos:tantalos}{name=Tantalos, description={Just a random name.}}
\newglossaryentry{glos:zebra}{name=Zebra, description=\nopostdesc}
% Use the entries so that they show up in the glossary.
\gls{glos:begin}
\gls{glos:bold}
\gls{glos:bear}
\gls{glos:chicken}
\gls{glos:elephant}
\gls{glos:tantalos}
\gls{glos:zebra}
% Print the glossary with one of the mcol styles.
\printglossary[style=mcolindex, title=Index]
\end{document}
Best Answer
Try
\columnwidthas a drop-in replacement for\textwidth.