Is there a “\nocolumnbreak” analog to \nopagebreak?

Question

If I want to prevent latex from putting two (short) paragraphs on different columns, is there something similar to \nopagebreak that will let me do this?

Answer 1

AFAIK columns are handled like different pages and so \nopagebreak should do what you want.

However, could simply wrap the paragraphs into \begin{minipage}{\columnwidth} ... \end{minipage} to prevent page or column breaking between or inside them. This should work fine as long you don't have footnotes in the paragraphs which would be placed at the bottom of the minipage.