[Tex/LaTex] How to prevent column break in multicols environment

multicolpage-breaking

I am typesetting a simple songbook and would like some songs to be displayed in two columns (I use the multicol package). However, I would like to prevent inserting a columnbreak within a stanza. It would be great to have something like a samecol environment.

I tried to apply hints from Prevent column break in multicolumn index, but it didn't yield the expected result.

I'd be grateful for any advice.

Best Answer

I found the answer accidentally, while looking for something else. In order to prevent column break within a stanza I mark line ends with \\* instead of \\. Example:

\begin{multicols}{2}
  \begin{verse}       
     I heard, I heard, the old man say,\\*
     John Kanaka-naka tu-lai-ay!\\*
     Today, today is a holiday,\\*
     John Kanaka-naka tu-lai-ay!

     Tu-lai-ay, Oh! Tu-lai-ay!\\*
     John Kanaka-naka tu-lai-ay!
  \end{verse} 
 \end{multicols}

I realize this does not solve the general problem of column break prevention, but perfectly fits my needs.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] single column footnote in multicols environment

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_up procedure 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.

[Tex/LaTex] Span column in a multicols environment

Here's a generalized version of Tom Bombadil's \multicolinterrupt macro: The current value of \col@number is saved before ending the multicols environment, and after typesetting the "interruption" text a new multicols environment with the same number of columns as the last one is started.

\documentclass[parskip]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[margin=15mm]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\newcounter{tempcolnum}

\makeatletter
\newcommand{\multicolinterrupt}[1]{% Stuff to span both rows
\setcounter{tempcolnum}{\col@number}
\end{multicols}
#1%
\begin{multicols}{\value{tempcolnum}}
}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{multicols}{3}
\lipsum[1-2]
\multicolinterrupt{\textcolor{blue}{\lipsum[3-4]}}
\lipsum[5-6]
\end{multicols}

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] single column footnote in multicols environment

[Tex/LaTex] Span column in a multicols environment

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