spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) (06/11/90)
I have been setting a book in LaTeX with two columns on an A4 page (don't ask why, it looks awful). It is killing me: + I have some floating tables, which I want full-width. About 8 hours of investigation and head-banging proves to me that when I have an over-long table (its about twice a pagelength, I had forgotten about it), it stifles all future tables without telling me, so that their \labels do not even get written to the .aux file. + Before I switched to Mittelbach's `multicol', I got an occasional and unfathomable `arithmetic overflow' when using \chapter*; was this related to my table constipation? + Not unreasonably, I want my text to be aligned on the same baseline in facing columns on the same page. Do you realize just how many little macros sneak some glue into the output to ruin my effect? Has anyone got a good example of *achieving* this aim? (again, dont ask me why, its not my design). What IS the answer to ensuring that a section title, which appears in one column only, takes up a multiple of the \baselineskip _when you dont know how many lines it will take?_ I think my first point probably throws up a bug deep in LaTeX's monkeying with `dbldeferlist'. If I could give an example of it breaking, I would.... Sebastian Rahtz