Formatting documents with floats; A new algorithm

This paper describes an approach to placement of floats in multicolumn documents. The current version of L TEX was originally written for single-column documents and extended to support twocolumn documents by essentially building each column independently from the other. As a result the current system shows severe limitations in two column mode, such as the fact that spanning floats are always deferred to at least the next page or that numbering between column floats and spanning floats can get out of sequence. The new algorithm is intended to overcome these limitations and at the same time extend the supported class of document layouts to multiple columns with floats spanning an arbitrary number of columns.