3.3 Multiple Media

Although the book will be printed in a two column format, other media will generally be in a single column -- but without a known, fixed width. We therefore strongly prefer that authors not break their formula by hand.

We have adopted Michael J. Downes' equation breaking package, breqn[3]. It automatically breaks formulas across multiple lines depending on the current column width. Although this package is experimental, and the formulas we encounter stress the package, it is handling the task remarkably well. By hiding the invocation of breqn inside the standard equation environment, the author ideally is not even aware of its presence.

Nevertheless, there are formulas, as well as tables or other material, that the author knows will be too wide to be successfully stuffed into a narrow column. For this, a onecolumn environment is defined. In order to support this, and balanced switching between one and two column modes, we have integrated Frank Mittelbach's multicol package[6, Ch. 3]. Again, other than the onecolumn environment, the author need not be aware of its presence.