multicol — Multi-column Pages in LaTeX | Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

Oct 032007

multicol — Multi-column Pages in LaTeX

When I was adjusting my slides for a talk (to be given in Oct 16) in the Capital University of Economics and Business, I found the table of contents was a little bit too long to be placed in a single page while the titles of all sections are not so wide, thus I searched for some instructions on multi-column pages in LaTeX, and easily got this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Page_Layout. Some codes as follows will just help us separate a part of texts into several columns:

...
\usepackage{multicol}
...
\begin{multicols}{3}    % 3 columns
   If you are using a standard Latex document class,
   then you can simply pass the optional argument twocolumn
   to the document class: \documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
   which will give the desired effect.
\end{multicols}
...

This is what my table of contents looks like now:

16 Responses to “multicol — Multi-column Pages in LaTeX”

Comments (16)

Vidhya says:

2008/03/04 at 10:02 am

Very useful. Thank you

Reply
- Yihui says:
  
  2008/03/04 at 2:47 pm
  
  My pleasure
  
  Reply
spx2 says:

2008/06/11 at 1:44 am

how can one widen the columns of a multicols block ?

I am having trouble doing this

Reply
- Yihui says:
  
  2008/06/11 at 11:25 am
  
  Hi, its manual has told us that “the space between columns is controlled by the length parameter columnsep”. So you need to declare this length first, e.g. \setlength{\columnsep}{0pt}
  
  Reply
  - sharif says:
    
    2010/01/19 at 2:38 am
    
    Is this require any packages!!!!!
  - Yihui Xie says:
    
    2010/01/19 at 11:34 am
    
    Sure! Note in the code of the above article that you should declare in the preamble: \usepackage{multicol}
  - Dario says:
    
    2011/12/11 at 7:39 am
    
    Just a litte note for future readers, it’s:
    \setlength{\columnsep}{0pt}
    
    Thanks a lot for this blog entry btw
  - Yihui Xie says:
    
    2011/12/11 at 10:19 am
    
    Sorry for the typo. Fixed now, and thanks a lot!
Verbunk says:

2008/10/01 at 5:47 pm

Hi Guys,

What I'd like to do is make an uneven distribution of space for each column. So for instance make one 75% of the column space (break) then the rest for the remaining column.

Any tips on how to do this?

Reply
- Yihui says:
  
  2008/10/02 at 6:13 am
  
  Sorry, but I don't think multicol supports different column widths…
  
  Reply
  - Torsten says:
    
    2009/12/31 at 8:53 am
    
    e.g. minipage may help
  - Yihui Xie says:
    
    2009/12/31 at 1:30 pm
    
    Yes, we can set different widths via minipage, but these mini pages are arranged side by side, which is different from multicol.
    
    For multicol:
```
| this is a paragraph | umns. The division makes |
| divided into 2 col- | 2 parts of same height.  |
```
    For minipage:
```
------------------------------  ----------------
| this is a paragraph in the |  | this is the  |
| left minipage.             |  | 2nd minipage |
|                            |  |              |
------------------------------  ----------------
```
    That means we will have to arrange our texts by hand in two mini pages.
Viru says:

2009/02/20 at 9:56 am

Reply
Saeed says:

2011/02/26 at 3:57 pm

Hi.
I use two column format to write my paper. Some of my equations are very big, as a result they wrap two column. Can I add a one column part such as equation into the two column paper?

Reply
Bruce says:

2011/03/24 at 7:30 pm

Thanks.. So much easier than minipage.

Reply
Abhinav says:

2011/12/27 at 11:59 am

Thank you. i really needed this.

Reply

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