[OS X TeX] pagebreak within a paragraph in a twocolumn setup

[Alan Munn]

At 11:33 AM +0200 4/19/08, Reich Ingo wrote:
>Hi everybody,
>I'd like to set text in two essentially independent columns:

[snip]

>1. Suppose there is a long paragraph in one of the columns which is 
>too long to fit on the page. Then, what I'd like to have, is an 
>automatic pagebreak *within* the paragraph, i.e. (i) fill the page 
>with the first part of the paragraph, then continue on the next page 
>with the rest of the paragraph in twocolumn mode.
>
>2. I'd like to have different background colors for the two colums 
>(also extending across the page).
>

Hi Ingo,

The parallel package (or better the pdfcolparallel package (part of 
the oberdiek bundle)) will do the two column stuff that you want, if 
I understand your request correctly.

Different backgrounds, however, will be much more of a problem. 
Usually you can do this with a single column using the shaded 
environment from framed.sty.  Unfortunately, the shaded environment 
doesn't play nicely with parallel. If simply having different colour 
text for the two columns would work, that would be easy:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfcolparallel, lipsum, xcolor}
\begin{document}
\begin{Parallel}{3in}{2in}
\ParallelLText{\color{red}\lipsum}
\ParallelRText{\lipsum}
\end{Parallel}
\end{document}

Alan


-- 
Alan Munn 
amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics                             
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824       Tel.  +1-517-355-7491