Page Layout ⇒ Text at the Left, Floats on the Right

[aidanc]

I would like to have a two column document, where the text appears on the left and the referenced tables and charts appear in the right column, which gets filled out with white space. I know I can use the multicol environment and

Code: Select all

\vfill
\columnbreak

To start a new column before the floats, but it will obviously be very labour intensive to do this for every page of a long document, and would require moving all breaks any time I change the text.

So I was hoping someone might have a better way. Maybe it is possible without using columns but somehow limiting text width and right aligning charts, but I don’t know if this could work.

If you think this kind of layout is not really feasible in latex, that would be very useful to know. The reason for trying this is I need to conform with my company’s layout, so I’d be really grateful for any help.

Some sample code below.

Thanks in advance
Aidan

Code: Select all

\documentclass[10.5pt, a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}


\makeatletter
\newenvironment{tablehere}
{\def\@captype{table}}
{}
\newenvironment{figurehere}
{\def\@captype{figure}}
{}
\makeatother
%this forces the figure to appear in a column, taken from
%http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/multicol_hint.html

\begin{document}

\begin{multicols}{2}

TEXT OF PAGE 1, LEFT COLUMN, WHICH REFERENCES AFIGURE
..
TEXT OF PAGE 1, LEFT COLUMN, WHICH REFERENCES AFIGURE

\vfill
\columnbreak 


\begin{figurehere}
\centering
{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{THEFIGURE}}
\end{figurehere}



\vfill
\pagebreak 

TEXT OF PAGE 2, LEFT COLUMN, ..

\end{multicols}


\end{document}

[cgnieder]

This is just a hunch but the package paracol may be helpful?

[aidanc]

Hi Clemens,

thanks for your reply. The paracol package looks like a good option - it looks like \switchcolumn would allow me to keep text aligned between columns. I'm going to try using margin notes first, as it's easier to find examples of customised margin notes (font size etc), but if I get stuck I'll try paracol.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Aidan