[texhax] multicols and table

Steve Schwartz s.schwartz at imperial.ac.uk
Thu Sep 10 14:18:25 CEST 2009


Tom,

If you read just the abstract of the multicols documentation you will
learn that only page-wide floats (*-forms) can be used within multicols.
Additionally, the documentation later points out that within multicols,
*-ed floats never appear on the page in which they are encountered
(which is really really bad news for a poster!) These were, and are,
disappointing features of the otherwise useful package, particularly
since LaTeX's own \twocolumn environment handles floats pretty well
(though I think even it needs a fixltx2e package to keep things under
control).

But I would have thought for a poster you don't really need things to
float, and can spend the time if necessary to put column breaks and such
so as to position your table(s) where you want on the poster. Similarly,
you are unlikely to need to draw on latex's captions, numbering,
cross-referencing, etc. which the table environment provides.

Thus I'd be inclined to simply put what you want in a tabular
environment, and if desired hand-build your own captions and numbers, or
an environment to do it that didn't require the ability to float.

This will get you single-column tables. Anything wider would, I suspect,
require you to split the page into minipages or otherwise impose the
structure you want. I've not used any of the latex poster packages,
maybe they are some help.

Personally, I've never been convinced that latex was a very convenient
way to make a poster, unless there is an awful lot of mathematics to be
typeset that was intertwined with text.

Steve

On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 20:58 +0100, Tom Backer Johnsen wrote:
> I am working on a poster presentation where I want to have three columns 
> in a landscape format.  That is in itself simple, but I would like to 
> include a table in the columns.  I seems that the table environment does 
> does not show and output when included in the multicols environment.  Is 
> there some kind of workaround for this problem?
> 
> Tom
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