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Creating two columns in article, report or book

By thurnherr

Three different styles have to be distinguished when creating multiple columns in a Latex document. Either we want the whole document to have two columns, single pages or only part of a page. In order to do so, three different Latex commands are used…
Whole document (using article to write a paper):

The only thing you need to do is changing the first command of your Latex-file.

\documentclass[11pt,twocolumn]{article}

It will automatically create two columns in the entire document.

Note: if you are writing a paper, IEEE provides useful templates which can be used and adapted to your needs. You can download them from their “Author Digital Tool Box“.

Single pages:

The command \twocolumn starts a new page having two columns. Accordingly, \onecolumn starts a new page with a single column assuming you are in a two column environment as described above. Both commans do not take any arguments.

The is a way to define the distance between the two columns, use

\setlength{\columnsep}{distance}

If you need a line to separate the columns, the following command will do the job:

\setlength{\columnseprule}{thickness}

Part of a page:

I have posted another article on that, just have a look there. \minipage can also be used for text, not only for figures and tables.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

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This entry was posted on August 11, 2007 at 4:09 am and is filed under Introduction, LaTex, Tips & tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Creating two columns in article, report or book”

  1. Víctor Poblete Says:
    July 8, 2008 at 3:08 pm | Reply

    Hi, many thanks for this space of big help for LaTeX. I want to wite a paper with two columns but I need to insert a table (a little bit big, horizontally full page) and next, I must continue with two columns. Is that possible?

    Thanks,

    Víctor

  2. thurnherr Says:
    July 12, 2008 at 10:22 pm | Reply

    Hi Victor,

    The following code might help you solving your problem. The command “\twocolumn”, “\onecolumn” respectively will allways insert a new page, which is probably not what you want. When using “multicols” instead, you can have different layouts on a single page:


    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{multicol}
    \usepackage[english]{babel}
    \usepackage{blindtext}
    \begin{document}
    \begin{multicols}{2}[\textbf{Example for a two column text}]
    \blindtext
    \end{multicols}
    \begin{table}[ht]
    \caption{default}
    \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|}
    \hline
    onecolumn& onecolumn& onecolumn& onecolumn&onecolumn\\
    \hline
    onecolumn& onecolumn& onecolumn& onecolumn&onecolumn\\
    \hline
    \end{tabular}
    \end{center}
    \label{default}
    \end{table}%
    \begin{multicols}{2}
    \blindtext[10]
    \end{multicols}
    \end{document}

  3. Christophe H. Says:
    October 6, 2008 at 8:44 am | Reply

    Hi,
    Thank you for this very useful tip. However, I think there a backslash missing in both commands: it shoud be:
    \setlength{\columnsep}{distance}
    and
    \setlength{\columnseprule}{thickness}
    instead of
    \setlength{columnsep}{distance}
    and
    \setlength{columnseprule}{thickness}
    Regards,
    Christophe

  4. thurnherr Says:
    October 6, 2008 at 10:34 am | Reply

    Hi Christophe,

    You are right, there was a typo and I corrected it. Thanks for your help, I appreciate it very much.

    Cheers,
    Tom

  5. Edgar Says:
    August 23, 2009 at 1:39 am | Reply

    Tanks. Yours comands are very good and clear

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