Page Layout ⇒ multicolumn overlapping in wider paragraph

[smr01cmh]

Hi all,
I'm writing a Mathematical document that I hope will have one set of page dimensions for the sections that contain examples, and another set of page dimensions for the sections that contain exercises. Such formatting is commonplace in many text books (see for example James Stewart's Calculus texts).

I hope to have multiple columns in the exercise sections, but have so far not found a good way. Below is a MWE (that should highlight the overlapping columns).

Any advice on how to fix/work around this would be greatly appreciated.

Chris


\documentclass[10pt,letter]{report}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{blindtext}
% exercise environment
\newenvironment{exercises}{%
\par
\begingroup
% works fine without next lines! but I would like a 2 column environment wider page
\leftskip-10em
\rightskip-10em
\par
\section*{Exercises}
\begin{multicols}{2}
}%
{\end{multicols}\endgroup}

\begin{document}
\blindtext
\begin{exercises}
\blindtext
\end{exercises}
\end{document}

[gmedina]

Hi,

perhaps you could use the adjustwidth environment provided by the chngpage package. A little example:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[10pt,letter]{report}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{chngpage}

\newenvironment{exercises}
  {\begin{adjustwidth}{-1cm}{-1cm}\section*{Exercises}%
    \begin{multicols}{2}}
  {\end{multicols}\end{adjustwidth}}

\begin{document}
\blindtext
\begin{exercises}
\blindtext
\end{exercises}
\end{document}

[smr01cmh]

Awesome, that's perfect! Thank you so much for your help!

Chris