[tug-summer-of-code] Proposal: Improved multicol

[Rasmus Pank Roulund]

Hello,
Here a small proposal for a GSoC (La)TeX project. 

The multicol package is great and I guess that is part of the reason it
is part of the required tool bundle. While it is better than the "native"
twocolumns option it lacks certain features as Mr. Mittelbach points out
in the documentation. Mostly, it lacks float support (and marginpars) in
"column-mode".

Of course this can overcome by not using floats, but this is not an
optimal solution, especially if you want floats to appear at the top of
columns or similar. It require a lot of fiddling in a very non-TeXish
way. (I use the [H] option of float.sty or here.sty). 

Therefore, I would like to propose a summer project of extending
multicols either directly or by producing something like
multicolsfloats.sty. From the multicols manual it seems that it is
possible but time-consuming (footnote 2 on p. 2, v1.6g).

I have no idea whether this doable as a summer project, but I do
know it would be a great addition to multicols and it would enhance the
"magazine-capabilities" of LaTeX.

I guess Mr. Mittelbach would be an obvious candidate as mentor, but I do
not know if he would be willing to do so. Also, a project like this
would probably need his approval.

Cheers,
Rasmus