[Tex/LaTex] interaction between IEEETran, bibtex, and flushend

bibtexieeetran

I had been using the flushend package to even out the final page, which contained references, but I think I need to drop that if I don't find an answer to this. It seems when using that along with IEEEtran and bibtex, specifically the acm bibliography style, one of two bad things would happen in the right column. Depending on how things laid out, I might wind up with the final line of the right column not being indented like all other lines. Using leading periods to represent whitespace:

[29] ZHU, B., LI, K., AND PATTERSON, H. Avoiding the disk bottleneck in
.....the data domain deduplication file system. In USENIX Conference on
File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2008.

Or, I might have the final line suppressed entirely, even stranger! 

[29] ZHU, B., LI, K., AND PATTERSON, H. Avoiding the disk bottleneck in
.....the data domain deduplication file system. In USENIX Conference on

I can't post my entire paper but perhaps I can show a minimal example. I want to start by asking if anyone has come across this and, hopefully, solved it. (Other than dropping flushend, which is obvious, but unsatisfactory.)

Here is a MWE template:

\documentclass[letterpaper,twocolumn,10pt,conference]{IEEEtran}

\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{flushend}

\begin{document}

\lipsum
\cite{
% add a bunch of references from mwe.bib here -- 
% don't matter which as long as they appear before the one I see breaking 
% each time, zhu
zhu
}

  \bibliographystyle{acm}
  \bibliography{mwe}    
\end{document}

mwe.bib should include enough citations to go to 2 columns of the second page, including:

@inproceedings{zhu,
  author =        {Benjamin Zhu and Kai Li and Hugo Patterson},
  booktitle =     {USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
                   (FAST'08)},
  month =         {Feb},
  title =         {Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck in the {D}ata {D}omain
                   Deduplication File System},
  year =          {2008},
}

I can't with this force the example where I was seeing the final line not appear, though I consistently see the indentation messed up. Copy some bibliography to mwe.bib and add a number of citations in the body of the document.

PS. This is likely related to Incompatibility between 'flushend' and 'lineno' packages! — I am guessing flushend is breaking multiple things — but I didn't see an appropriate answer there.

UPDATE: Just noticed that this problem occurs in a newly built system using a version of flushend with copyright through 2016, but does not occur in an older system using a version with copyright through 2014.

Best Answer

\usepackage[keeplastbox]{flushend}

can fix the problem. See Balancing the last page in twocolumn LaTeX documents

UPDATE： Example (omit most comments); it seems that using tikz package causes the problem in my case.

%% bare_conf.tex
%% V1.4b
%% 2015/08/26
%% by Michael Shell
%% See:
%% http://www.michaelshell.org/
%% for current contact information.
%%
%% This is a skeleton file demonstrating the use of IEEEtran.cls
%% (requires IEEEtran.cls version 1.8b or later) with an IEEE
%% conference paper.
%%
%% Support sites:
%% http://www.michaelshell.org/tex/ieeetran/
%% http://www.ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran
%% and
%% http://www.ieee.org/


\documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}

\hyphenation{op-tical net-works semi-conduc-tor}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{flushend}
%\usepackage[keeplastbox]{flushend}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{test.bib}

@inproceedings{zhu,
  author =        {Benjamin Zhu and Kai Li and Hugo Patterson},
  booktitle =     {USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
                   (FAST'08)},
  month =         {Feb},
  title =         {Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck in the {D}ata {D}omain
                   Deduplication File System},
  year =          {2008},
}
\end{filecontents*}




\begin{document}

\title{Bare Demo of IEEEtran.cls\\ for IEEE Conferences}

\author{\IEEEauthorblockN{Michael Shell}}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
The abstract goes here.
\end{abstract}

\IEEEpeerreviewmaketitle

\section{Introduction}

This demo file is intended to serve as a ``starter file''
for IEEE conference papers produced under \LaTeX\ using
IEEEtran.cls version 1.8b and later.

I wish you the best of success.

\hfill mds

\hfill August 26, 2015

\subsection{Subsection Heading Here}
Subsection text here. Citations here \cite{zhu}.

\subsubsection{Subsubsection Heading Here}
Subsubsection text here.

\section{Conclusion}
The conclusion goes here.

\section*{Acknowledgment}
The authors would like to thank...

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{test}


\end{document}

output is : \usepackage{flushend}

if using \usepackage[keeplastbox]{flushend}, results is: keeplastbox

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