column in latex presentation

Brandon Rozek

PhD Student @ RPI studying Automated Reasoning in AI and Linux Enthusiast.

Multi-Column slides in Beamer

Published on January 26, 2022

Updated on February 18, 2023

When creating slides in LaTex Beamer, it can be frustrating to not have the easy ability to drag text boxes around. Luckily, creating a multi-column layout in Beamer is not difficult! Below is an example of a two column slide layout, where the left side is a bulleted list, and the right side is an image:

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• How to make a presentation with Latex - Introduction to Beamer
• exampleblock
• compilation
• beamergotobutton
• presentation

We shall see in this article how to make a presentation with LaTeX, using the powerful class Beamer. If you want to make an outstanding “stressfree” presentation and bring your ideas or your work under a whole new light, let’s get started!!!

Installing the Beamer class

You will first need to install the package Beamer . Under Debian or Ubuntu, you can type the following command:

Once the latex-class Beamer is installed, you are definitely ready to stat your first presentation!!!

Basic presentation with Beamer

A few explanations:

means that our document is a Beamer presentation

this package enables us to use special letters (with accents, cedillas, etc). You can discard this command when the presentation is in English.

This is our outer theme (color and background). As you can imagine, there are tons of themes. You can refer to Beamer documentation for more details.

this defines the title of the presentation. As you can see, there are two titles:

• the first one, between brackets. [Making a LaTeX presentation with Beamer] is a substitute title which appears at the bottom of the page. This is useful especially if the original title is long. Since this is anoption only, if it is not mentioned, then the original title is the one shown in the bottom of the page.
• the second one, between braces, is the principal title of the presentation. The command

defines Nadir Soualem and Astozzia (us!) as the authors of the presentation.

defines where the presentation was held. Finally, we use

as the date.

To define the document, we use the markers

To define a slide of the presentation, we use the markers

To define a page title (frame), we mention it as follows

Introduction will be the title of the page. To define the first page, which contains details such as the title, the author, the date, etc - we use a frame in which we include the \titlepage command

To define a frame containing the layout of the presentation, we proceed as follows:

The layout is therefore mentioned at every section and subsection. You should insert \section and \subsection throughout the presentation and out of the frames:

Animations – Overlays

A good presentation is one that is dynamic and attracts the audience’s interest. Generally, we resort to a dynamic type of presentations. Alternatively stated, when we speak, we simultaneously show significant points of the talk, or hide others, or keep just the important ones. We shall see in this section how animations function in Beamer.

Item-by-item list view: the \pause command

In order to view several items of a list on the same slide, we type the following commands inside a frame:

We will thus see the items of our list, one by one.

Item-by-item list view: the \item<n-> command

An alternative way to visualize the elements of a list item by item is to use the \item<n-> command, where n is a natural number referring to the slide, beginning from which the item appears.

List item interval and isolated items: the \item<n-> and \item<p> commands

An example is worth a long speech:

\item<n-> means that the list item will appear on slides numbered n to m, whereas \item<p> means that the item will appear on slide p.

Item-by-item long list view: the [<+->] command

Sometimes the lists you want to display are long and it is not practical to use the \item<n-> command. An alternative solution is the use of the [<+->] command

Up to now, we have dealt with lists. We shall now see how to use text and slides.

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \uncover<n->, \uncover<n-> and \uncover<p> commands

\uncover<n-> will display the text from slide n on; \uncover<n-> means the text element will appear from slide n to m. Finally, \uncover<p> means that the text will appear on slide p. Here is a case in point of a frame containing the \uncover command.

Be careful not to forget the braces after the \uncover command. The syntax is as follows:

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \only<n->, \only<n-> and \only<p> commands

\only works like \uncover with the exception that the \only command is not as “cumbersome” on slides. Here is an example:

Here is an other example to better grasp the difference between \only and \uncover

Hide text in slides: the \invisible<n> commands

\invisible<n> makes text invisible on slide n

Another alternative: the \alt<n>{…}{…} commands

As an alternative, one can use the \alt<n>{…}{…} command on a slide. The first argument is the value on slide n. The second is for values other than n. Here is an example:

Highlighting text in red: the \alert<n>{…} command

To highlight text in red on slide n, we use the \alert<n>{…} command.

Successively highlighting list items in red: the <+-| alert@+> command

Using colors in a text on a slide: the \color<n->{…}{…}, \color<n->{…}{…} and\color<p>{…}{…} commands.

The first argument is the red, green, yellow, blue, etc … The second is the text to be colored

Creating links: the \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} commands

To define internal links, we should add the following package in the preamble

Then, we should define a label pointing on the frame:

you define MY_LABEL as you please ! Finally, on the frame where the link is to be created, we proceed as follows:

There we are! We can see a button Refer to this page pointing to the frame labeled MY_LABEL .

Thus, the first argument of \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} is the name of the label to be pointed at and \beamergotobutton{…} has the name of the button as an argument.

Defining blocks inside frames

For important stuff, we define blocks as follows:

As clear as onion soup !!!

Dynamic display of tables: the \pause and \onslide<n-> commands

First off, we should add the package colortbl to the preamble

To display rows dynamically, we shall use the \pause command as follows:

To display columns dynamically, we shall use the \onslide<n-> command as follows:

Writing on several columns: the \begin{columns}...\end{columns} commands

For two columns, we proceed as follows:

l,r,c refers to the position: left, right, center. The syntax is as follows:

Inserting a figure in a Beamer presentation

To insert an image or a figure, we proceed as in LaTeX by using the \includegraphics command. Here is an example:

In Beamer, we should distinguish between two types of figures:

• PS type: .eps, .ps and pspicture type (LaTeX)
• General type: .pdf, .png, .jpg, .jpeg You will need to compile a Beamer-class file.

Compiling a Beamer presentation

I assume that the your file is called file.tex. . There are ways to compile, depending on the type of figure you inserted. For PS-type figures, we shall use the following commands

We shall obtain the file file.pdf.

For general-type figures, we shall use the command

We shall also obtain the file file.pdf.

It goes without saying that explaining all the possibilities that Beamer offers is way too long. Have look to the official documentation, which is more exhaustive.

Have fun !!!

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Personal blog of Felix Hoffmann on computational neuroscience, mathematics, open science and the tools he uses keep organizes his thoughts and ideas.

3 Diagrams per Page

A latex beamer two-column frame template with proper vertical spacing.

I made a LaTex Beamer template for creating presentations in a two-column format. I use this style to have figures on the right and text on the left. Here's the presentation the template produces:

Vertical spacing and overlays can be tricky when working in columns. First, to allow for convenient spacing via \vfill , a minipage has to be included in the text-column.

In the figure column, you might want figures to vertically centered (single image) or aligned from the top (multiple images, overlay). Both can be achieved by including either a \parbox or \minipage . The full frame producing the presentation above is:

Check out the GitHub repository for the full .tex files.

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LaTeX/Presentations

LaTeX can be used for creating presentations. There are several packages for the task, such as- Powerdot , Prosper , Seminar , etc, however, the Beamer package is the most widely used.

It should be noted that Latex produces the presentation as a PDF which can be viewed in fullscreen mode with some pdf reader (e.g. Okular , Evince or Adobe Reader). If you want to navigate in your presentation, you can use the almost invisible links in the bottom right corner without leaving the fullscreen mode.

• 1.1 Title page and author information
• 1.2.1 Sections and subsections
• 1.2.2 References (Beamer)
• 1.3.1 The Built-in solution
• 1.3.2 User-defined themes
• 1.3.3.1 Math Fonts
• 1.4 Frames Options
• 1.5 Hyperlink navigation
• 1.6 Animations
• 1.7 Handout mode
• 1.8 Columns
• 1.10 PDF options
• 1.11 Numbering slides
• 2 The Powerdot package
• 3.1 Beamer based themes/examples
• 3.2 References

The Beamer package

The beamer package is provided with most LaTeX distributions, but is also available from CTAN . If you use MikTeX, all you have to do is to include the beamer package and let LaTeX download all wanted packages automatically. The documentation explains the features in great detail. You can also have a look at the PracTex article Beamer by Example . [1]

The beamer package also loads many useful packages including xcolors, hyperref , etc. An introductory example and its output are shown below.

In above code, the Beamer package is loaded by the \documentclass{beamer} command in the header. The usual header information may then be specified. In Beamer presentation a frame is an equivalent term for the slide (used in MS office). A frame is defined using the environment \begin{frame} ...... \end{frame} . The \frametitle{} command specifies the title for each slide. The frame title and subtitle can also be passed with the environment as following.

The usual environments ( itemize , enumerate , equation , etc.) may be used. Inside frames, you can use environments like block , theorem , proof , ... Also, \maketitle is possible to create the Title page, if title and author are set.

Title page and author information

The title page is the first page where one may insert following information

• Title and subtitle (optional)- Use \title and \subtitle commands, or use \title[short title (optional)]{Long title}{subtitle (optional)}
• Author(s) name- Use the \author{} command.
• Institute name- Use the \institute command. Note the use of \inst{1} and \inst{2} commands to associate the authors with their respective institutes.
• Date and Place of presentation- It can be inserted using the \date[short date(optional)]{Long date} command.
• Logo of Institute, etc.

It should be noted that the information within square braces, i.e., [ ] is optional.

It is important to include the \maketitle command in the document (as in above code) to create the title frame. The commands \maketitle and \titlepage are equivalent.

Table of Contents

The table of contents, with the current section highlighted, is displayed by:

This can be done automatically at the beginning of each section using the following code in the preamble:

Or for subsections:

Sections and subsections

As in all other LaTeX files, it is possible to structure the document using

Those commands have to be put before and between frames. They will modify the table of contents with the argument in brackets. The optional argument will be shown in the headline navigation on the slide, depending on the theme used. You can use \sectionpage macro to generate a separator slide for a declared section, for example

References (Beamer)

The following example shows a manually made references slide containing two entries:

As the reference list grows, the reference slide will divide into two slides and so on, through use of the allowframebreaks option. Individual items can be cited after adding an 'optional' label to the relevant bibitem stanza. The citation call is simply \cite . Beamer also supports limited customization of the way references are presented (see the manual).

The different types of referenced work are indicated with a little symbol (e.g. a book, an article, etc.). The symbol is set with the commands beamertemplatebookbibitems and beamertemplatearticlebibitems . It is also possible to use setbeamertemplate directly, like so

Other possible types of bibliography items, besides book and article , include e.g. online , triangle and text . It is also possible to have user defined bibliography items by including a graphic.

If one wants to have full references appear as foot notes, use the \footfullcite from the biblatex package. For example, it is possible to use

Beamer offers two ways for define the themes- 1) Use built-in themes, 2) Use user-defined themes.

The Built-in solution

Beamer has several built-in themes which can be used by specifying their "Name" and their "color" in the preamble. This Theme Matrix contains the various theme and color combinations included with Beamer . For more customizing options, have a look to the official documentation included in your distribution of beamer , particularly the part Change the way it looks .

The full list of themes is:

The full list of color themes is:

User-defined themes

First you can specify the outertheme , which defines the head and the footline of each slide.

Here is a list of all available outer and inner themes:

You can define the color of every element:

Colors can be defined as usual:

Block styles can also be defined:

You can also suppress the navigation symbols:

You may also change the fonts for particular elements. If you wanted the title of the presentation as rendered by \begin { frame } [plain] \titlepage\end { frame } to occur in a serif font instead of the default sanserif, you would use:

You could take this a step further if you are using OpenType fonts with Xe(La)TeX and specify a serif font with increased size and oldstyle proportional alternate number glyphs:

The default settings for beamer use a different set of math fonts than one would expect from creating a simple math article. One quick fix for this is to use

Frames Options

The options to a frame can be passed as following

Some of the useful options and their description is following.

• plain : This option removes all the formatting from your slide and thus give you extra space to accommodate a large figure or a large table.
• shrink : If you want to include lots of text on a slide use the shrink option.
• allowframebreaks  : option will auto-create new frames if there is too much content to be displayed on one.
• fragile : Before using any verbatim environment (like listings ), you should pass the option fragile to the frame environment, as verbatim environments need to be typeset differently. Usually, the form fragile=singleslide is usable (for details see the manual). Note that the fragile option may not be used with \frame commands since it expects to encounter a \end { frame } , which should be alone on a single line.

Hyperlink navigation

Internal and external hyperlinks can be used in beamer to assist navigation. Clean looking buttons can also be added.

By default the beamer class adds navigation buttons in the bottom right corner. To remove them one can place

in the preamble.

It is possible to make figure and text to appear and disappear using the commands such as \pause, \uncover, \only and \itemize<a-b>. Text or figures after these commands will display after one of the following events (which may vary between PDF viewers): pressing space, return or page down on the keyboard, or using the mouse to scroll down or click the next slide button. A short explanation of each command is as follows and refer to chapter 9 of the Beamer manual for more details..

The \pause statement can be used as following to provide a break. I.e. the text after the command will be displayed on next event (button click/ key press/etc.)

The \uncover command specifies the appearance explicitly; \only works the same but without reserving space when hidden.

The \item command specifies appearance and disappearance of text by using <a-b> where a and b are the numbers of the events the item is to be displayed for (inclusive). For example:

A simpler approach for revealing one item per click is to use \begin { itemize } [<+->] .

In all these cases, pressing page up, scrolling up, or clicking the previous slide button in the navigation bar will backtrack through the sequence.

Above command uncovers the item and they are visible only on/after the specified frame numbers. One may also use the \setbeamercovered{transparent} command to see the uncovered items, which are shown with little opacity. This means if the visible text is in black then the uncovered text will be in gray. One may use \setbeamercovered{invisible} to revert this setting.

Similar option is also available for formatting the text. for example if you want the text to be of specific style then you may use \style<3->{Text} command. For example one may use \alert<3->{Some text.} which will show the specified text in the respective formatting for specified slides. Similarly one may use

\textbf, \textit, \textsl, \textrm, \textsf, \textcolor, \structure etc. commands.

Same is true for theorem, corollary, and proof environments. An example is given below.

For the tables one must add \onslide slide command before placing the new line (i.e., \\) .

Test 1 & repeat & 14.5 & 656 \onslide<3-> \\

Handout mode

In beamer class, the default mode is presentation which makes the slides. However, you can work in a different mode that is called handout by setting this option when calling the class:

This mode is useful to see each slide only one time with all its stuff on it, making any \itemize [<+->] environments visible all at once (for instance, printable version). Nevertheless, this makes an issue when working with the only command, because its purpose is to have only some text or figures at a time and not all of them together.

If you want to solve this, you can add a statement to specify precisely the behavior when dealing with only commands in handout mode. Suppose you have a code like this

These pictures being completely different, you want them both in the handout, but they cannot be both on the same slide since they are large. The solution is to add the handout statement to have the following:

This will ensure the handout will make a slide for each picture.

Now imagine you still have your two pictures with the only statements, but the second one show the first one plus some other graphs and you don't need the first one to appear in the handout. You can thus precise the handout mode not to include some only commands by:

The command can also be used to hide frames, e.g.

or even, if you have written a frame that you don't want anymore but maybe you will need it later, you can write

and this will hide your slide in both modes.

A last word about the handout mode is about the notes. Actually, the full syntax for a frame is

and you can write your notes about a frame in the field note (many of them if needed). Using this, you can add an option

The first one is useful when you make a presentation to have only the notes you need, while the second one could be given to those who have followed your presentation or those who missed it, for them to have both the slides with what you said.

Columns environment divides a slide (vertically) into columns. Example

Enclosing text in the block environment creates a distinct, headed block of text (a blank heading can be used). This allows to visually distinguish parts of a slide easily. There are three basic types of block. Their formatting depends on the theme being used.

PDF options

You can specify the default options of your PDF. [2]

Numbering slides

It is possible to number slides using this snippet:

However, this poses two problems for some presentation authors: the title slide is numbered as the first one, and the appendix or so-called "backup" (aka appendix, reserve) slides are included in the total count despite them not being intended to be public until a "hard" question is asked. [3] This is where two features come in:

• Ability to exclude certain frames from being numbered. For instance, this may be used at the title slide to avoid counting it:
• This stuff works around the problem of counting the backup frames:

The Powerdot package

The powerdot package is an alternative to beamer. It is available from CTAN . The documentation explains the features in great detail.

The powerdot package is loaded by calling the powerdot class:

The usual header information may then be specified.

Inside the usual document environment, multiple slide environments specify the content to be put on each slide.

Simple presentations

The beamer class is very powerful and provides lots of features. For a very simple presentation, a class based on article can be used.

Beamer based themes/examples

Some of the nice examples of the presentation are available below

• The Nord beamer theme
• Metropolis theme
• Kenton Hamaluik
• A list of theme maintained at github
• ↑ Andrew Mertz and William Slough, Beamer by Example
• ↑ Other possible values are defined in the hyperref manual
• ↑ Appendix Slides in Beamer: Controlling frame numbers
• Wikipedia:Beamer (LaTeX)
• Beamer user guide (pdf) from CTAN
• The powerdot class (pdf) from CTAN
• A tutorial for creating presentations using beamer

• Pages using deprecated enclose attributes
• Wikibooks pages with to-do lists

Navigation menu

because LaTeX matters

Side-by-side content in beamer presentations.

There are two ways (and possibly more) to place content side-by-side in a beamer presentation, the columns and the minipage environments. The first is a beamer-specific environment and is therefore only available in a beamer presentation. Whereas the latter has other applications and is available in all document-classes.

General considerations

In any LaTeX document, there is a predefined width available for text, \textwidth . In order to place content side-by-side, this width has to be split in such a way that the total width of all elements does not exceed \textwidth . Otherwise, LaTeX will automatically break the line and place elements on top of each other, which is usually not desired. The value \textwidth can be used to define the width of a column or minipage . For example, 0.33\textwidth takes a third of width of a page available for content. LaTeX also adds a small horizontal space between elements. Therefore, in order to split a page into three equal parts, 0.3\textwidth might be a more reasonable number. If required, one can add more horizontal white-space between two elements using \quad or \qquad .

The columns environment

The columns environment is only available in the beamer document-class and might therefore be lesser known.

Basic command structure:

And here is a complete minimal working example:

The minipage environment

I wrote an article on the minipage environment quite some time ago. In beamer , the usage is not different.

The command is used as follows:

Below is a complete minimal working example:

Even though there are differences, I don’t know of any advantage of one method over the other when placing content side-by-side. However, I suggest choosing one environment and sticking to it throughout a presentation.

Share this:

9. November 2013 at 9:44

Thank you for the post. Dividing the width into several parts has solved my problem of putting two images side by side in a presentation.

21. June 2015 at 21:25

I want to do this with a tikz picture on one side and an itemized list on the other. My suspicion is that the minipage approach is better for this application. Have you any experience with this use case?

22. July 2015 at 21:37

Both approaches should work just fine. Why do you think minipage is more suitable in this case?

Thanks, Tom

14. March 2019 at 5:07

One reason to use minipage is this: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/16447/beamer-top-aligning-columns-within-a-top-aligned-frame

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Beamer Table – Full guide with examples

Learn how to create and customize tables in Beamer. This includes content alignment, spacing, highlight cells with colors, resize tables and much more!

1. insert a table in beamer, 2. horizontal lines and multicolumns in beamer tables, 3. table environment, 4. set the table size, 5. change font size for tables, 6. spacing in tables, 7. how to use colors to highlight tables in beamer, 8. tables inside blocks.

The tabular environment takes a mandatory argument that specifies the alignment for text in the different columns:

• l for left-aligned text,
• c for centered text,
• r for right-aligned text.

There should be the same number of alignment specifiers as columns.

Knowing this and using the \hline command to produce horizontal lines , we can already build a frame with a simple table; the following example shows how to do so:

Compiling this code yields:

Let’s now explore some more advanced functionalities of this tabular environment.

The command \multicolumn{n}{pos}{item} can be used to create items that expand for multiple columns where:

• n stands for the number of columns to be spanned,
• pos specifies the horizontal positioning of the item (using the same specifiers as in the mandatory argument of the environment l , c , and r )
• item is the content itself to be printed.

Here we put into practice the previous commands:

When the environment argument has | characters, it’s not obvious which of them get replaced by a \multicolumn ’s positioning argument. In this case, the rule that LaTeX follows is: the part of the environment argument corresponding to any column other than the first, begins with an l , r or c character.

This means that the argument of the previous example |c||ccc| is split into |c|| , c , c , and c| . For this reason, the |c| specifier inside the \multicolumn environment can be changed for c| and the result will be the same.

The tabular environment produces a box, which is the fundamental object that the underlying system TeX uses to build the document. This means that a table produced by this environment is no different that a letter typed, which makes possible to print tables in a middle of a paragraph, sentence or word. But that would look a bit strange.

Usually the tabular environment is inserted inside the table environment, which makes it a floating object. This means that you can add positioning specifiers to the floating object, a caption and a label to reference it.

This is how our previous table would look in a more realistic use of the environment:

We have already seen how to create a table in beamer using the tabular environment. When doing so, it was mentioned that technically, for TeX, the output of the tabular environment is the same as a letter; for the system, it is just a box.

And as all boxes in TeX, it can be resized using the command \resizebox . Here is an example of this command in action to fit inside a single frame a very big table :

which yields the following result:

Here is the non resized version:

Observe that the command takes three mandatory arguments:

• the horizontal size of the new box,
• the vertical size of the new box
• the box to be resized.

When one of the two size arguments contains the symbol ! (as in the example above) the value of this argument is selected by LaTeX so that the aspect ratio of the box is preserved . It is highly recommended to use it unless you know what you are doing; in other case you may get some ugly results.

When resizing the box generated by a tabular environment using \resizebox , the font size is automatically scaled to fit the size needed. However, you may want to set a fixed font size for the table, to make it larger or smaller, using one of the predefined LaTeX sizes: \tiny , \scriptsize , \footnotesize , \small , \normalsize , \large , \Large , \LARGE , \huge and \Huge . To do so, you only have to put the tabular environment inside a block containing the font size declaration that you want. For example, here I fit the previous table inside the frame using this new approach:

and the result in this case is shown below:

a. Vertical spacing

B. horizontal spacing.

If we redefine this command and dimension in the document preamble, they will be changed throughout all the document . However, if we do it inside an environment or a {} group, they will only affect the scope of the environment or group. This is useful when we want to use the default settings for our document, but we wish to fine tune a given table that looks odd.

c. Illustrative example

In the following example, we use the previous commands to increase the padding in our table:

A lot of color functionality is already integrated inside beamer, without the necessity of explicitly loading external packages such as xcolor. The reason for this is rather obvious: colors play a very important role in any beamer presentation ; a black and white presentation is not exactly what we are looking for when using beamer.

First, let’s see an example of this package in action, and then I will explain in more detail the main commands it provides :

The result of this code can be seen below:

Let’s jump into the details of the code :

• First of all, we defined some colors as it is usually done with the xcolor package ; nevertheless, we didn’t load it, since beamer does it for us .
• In this case, we defined the colors using a RGB tuple, but there are other ways available (HTML, greyscale, etc).
• Then we defined a new kind of column, that is, a new kind of column specifier for the tabular environment. This definition, in spite of its complex notation, is very simple: we just specify the color of the column inside \columncolor and then we select its alignment with the common l , r and c specifiers. Then this specifier is used for the columns that we want to color .
• Coloring rows is even simpler: we just have to use the command \rowcolor inside the row we want to color. As you can see, the color of the row has preference over the column color.

We can insert without any trouble a tabular environment inside a block . In the following example we use the Warsaw theme to have styled blocks and we print a table inside an alertblock :

which produces the following image:

In this lesson, we learned how to create tables in beamer using the tabular environment. We highlighted different alignment and spacing options and how one can highlight cells with different colors.

Next Lesson:  15 Figures i n Beamer – A detailed tutorial

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how to insert two columns in latex?

I wish to write the code of the picture displayed below..

• 3 Googling 'latex two columns' returns texblog: Creating two columns in article, report or book as the second result, and LaTeX Wikibook: Page Layout as the third. –  Mike Renfro Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 17:45
• 1 There are many options: The simplest would be to use a tabular environment with two columns: \begin{tabular}{ll} [. . .] \end{tabular} If you need text wrapping in the right column you can write \begin{tabular}{l p{0.5\linewidth} for example. –  musarithmia Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 17:45
• If you can show us a complete sample document with the code you've tried, we can help you better. –  musarithmia Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 17:47
• possible duplicate of How can I make two columns in two columns –  Basilius Sapientia Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 17:54
• 2 Downvoter: I think the comments were sufficient without the downvote. We have all had times when we didn't know where to start. –  musarithmia Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 17:54

2 Answers 2

One simple way to put a short portion of text into two columns, if the rows need to line up, is to use the basic tabular environment. You can use the p specification to get a row with wrapped text.

For beginners in TeX who find this answer helpful, you can find a basic introduction to LaTeX by entering texdoc lshort at a terminal.

• Is there a way to allow spaces to align the columns in the source document without getting overfull hbox errors? –  Andrew Hundt Commented Sep 15, 2015 at 4:47
• @AndrewHundt Yes, TeX ignores most extra whitespace so you can insert spaces or tabs between columns to align the source code. Overfull hboxes happen when there is too much text in a table cell to fit in the box allotted to it, among other reasons. –  musarithmia Commented Sep 15, 2015 at 5:38

As seen on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1491717/how-to-display-a-content-in-two-column-layout-in-latex there are multiple useful options:

Use the multicol package (if you omit the \columnbreak , the columns will balance automatically):

Alternatively, for precise control, add a minipage:

You may also find this useful: How do I force a column-break in a multi-column page?

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How split a /tableofcontents in two or more columns?

I have a long index (outline) for a presentation. Obviosly my index exceeds the size of a presentation page.

Is there a way to split a /tableofcontents in two columns?. This my code to generate the index.

• tableofcontents

• 1 this should be migrated to the TEX-Forum, right!? Can everyone do that? –  PikkuKatja Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 20:15

2 Answers 2

For a better control over the break point, one could also split the toc manually

The solution is:

• 5 The assumption is that you need to include at least the multicol package ... –  Werner Commented Jun 27, 2014 at 5:00
• 1 Note also that in this case the TOC will be broken as LaTeX sees fit. Thus breaks within a list of subsections may easily occur. –  Raven Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 18:09

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