Include floated figure in two column environment

Question

I'm using a two column layout and I'm trying to get a figure to appear on the bottom of the page it's currently on. Floats don't work natively in a multicol environment.

Right now I'm getting around this issue by placing the following on the page before the one I want the image to appear on:

\begin{figure*}[b!]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[scale=0.8]{graph}
  \captionof{figure}{graph}
\end{figure*}

It works, but the code sure isn't pretty... What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

Quoting the multicol documentation, section 2.4:

Stared floats, e.g., figure*, denote page wide floats that are handled in a similar fashion as normal floats outside the multicols environment. However, they will never show up on the page where they are encountered. In other words, one can influence their placement by specifying a combination of t, b, and/or p in their optional argument, but h doesn’t work because the first possible place is the top of the next page.

In other words, your code may not be pretty, but it is as good as it gets in LaTeX(2e). (Float placement in multi-column environments is one of the reasons to eagerly await LaTeX3.)