in case somebody is interested: http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/experimental/trunk/xpackages/xor/ now contains two pdfs xo-pfloat.pdf % my trial document and kind of documentation for the % OR xo-balance.pdf % my trial document for balancing balancing so far only works very crudely (e.g. grid typesetting breaks) but it already shows some nice effects like balancing around a top or bottom figure and more or less working with ftnright type of footnotes. well ... if anybody has some good ideas what footnotes are suppose to do within balanced text ... please tell me (options not dogmata :-) right now I support column footnotes or ftnright but only within the balanced text. another possibility would be to handle them like multicol does, ie pagewide or offpage, e.g. in the margin. not clear at all is how to change columns (or whether or not to support it). Multicol did this but at the cost of forbidding floats and this is really where the restriction are. If the column structure changes then all float placements have to be redone. in fact one would need a completely different type of float page specification (e.g. when going from 2 to three columns in the middle of the page). maybe the answer is that this is simply not supported and the only support is to have small parts falling back to single column in front of the balanced material so that you can have headings running across but otherwise fix the column structure except on page boundaries. what do you think? frank