In my LaTeX document, I don't want any figures on the first page. Is there a way to enforce this requirement?
[Tex/LaTex] Move figure away from the first page
floats
Related Solutions
You mention that very specific requirements for the document - only two pages, and a two-column format. The following minimal example duplicates this using the multicol package. It allows multiple column document format via the multicols environment that takes a mandatory argument:
\begin{multicols}{<n>}
...
\end{multicols}
This is an option in lieu of specifying a twocolumn document class option. As such, specifying your first image before starting the multicols environment, and specifying the second image after produces the desired result. The first image is still specified within a figure float with a float specifier of [b] (for bottom placement) while the last figure has a float specifier of [t] (for top placement):
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}% http://ctan.org/pkg/multicol
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}% http://ctan.org/pkg/graphicx
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}[b]
\centering
\includegraphics{figure1}
\caption{This is the first figure}
\end{figure}
\begin{multicols}{2}
\lipsum[1-7]
\end{multicols}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics{figure2}
\caption{This is the second figure}
\end{figure}
\end{document}
In the above example, graphicx is loaded with the demo package option which replaces all images with a 150pt x 100pt black rectangle (for compatibility reason). You should remove this for your document. Also, lipsum was used to generate dummy text.
[!b] probably works if the figure fits The ! tells latex to ignore numeric constraints. As you didn't supply an example I'm having to guess but maybe your class is inhibiting floats on the first page (the standard classes only inhibit top floats) ! would over-rule this. Also of course make sure that the figure appears early enough in the source.
Best Answer
You can suppress (further) floats on the current page using
\suppressfloats. To avoid floats on the first page, just place it directly after\begin{document}.