Greetings, On Friday, January 24, 2003, at 10:30 AM, Peter Breitenlohner wrote: > One important such (physics) journal with display equations spanning > two of > three columns is Phys.Rev. (published by APS). Actually, it is a two column format with wide equations that span both columns. > Moreover they sometimes > change the number of columns at such a display; Right. > all that is achieved by > their 'revtex' documentclass (standard LaTeX). REVTeX 3 didn't do so well here, especially when it comes to figure placements. REVTeX 4 which is built for LaTeX 2e uses Art Ogawa's ltxgrid package (part of the REVTeX 4 distribution) to hack around in the LaTeX 2e kernel in order to get fairly good results. But it is quite difficult and debugging all of the corner cases for column balancing was quite hairy. Also, there are simplifying assumptions which aren't really desirable such as losing vertical space above a section heading when rebalancing the columns. It would be great if whatever new kernel comes out has more hooks for doing these kinds of things in a robust way. I am not a TeX developer so I don't know the full details. I just know the hurdles Art ran into while implementing our requirements. > As for the virtue of such things: I personally find then hard to read. Me too, but it does save paper and it has become Phys. Rev's branding which remains important to authors. In fact, when we introduced an online-only journal (Phys. Rev. Spec. Topics - Accel. and Beams), the editors basically demanded that it still use the two column format even though it is suboptimal for online reading. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society