How to balance last page of two-column layout?

Question

I create a document in two-column-layout with LaTeX (and Koma-Script, if that is relevant). The two-column-layout is defined in documentclass. The last page of an chapter fills the left column first - the result is that both column are of different length. How can I balance that?

EDIT: flushend like mentioned in the answer of TH. doesn't work for me. Maybe it is conflicting with some other package I use?

EDIT 2: OK, after I tested with lipsum like suggested from Joseph Wright I saw it balanced. I tried a little bit and could find out, that flushend only balances the columns in the last chapter, not in all of them. Knowing that, I could see, that it is true for my document too, the last chapter has balanced columns. How can I achieve it for all of them? Here my short example:

\documentclass[a4paper, 10pt, twocolumn, DIV=18]{scrbook}

    \usepackage{flushend}
    \usepackage{lipsum}

    \begin{document}

    \chapter{test}

        \lipsum
        \lipsum

    \chapter{second}

        \lipsum
        \lipsum

    \chapter{third}

        \lipsum
        \lipsum

\end{document}

Answer 1

You can also use \usepackage{multicol} and use the \begin{multicols}{x} environment where x is the amount of columns. They will automatically align themselves according to what you want.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about Koma-Script in particular, but I've had reasonably good luck using the flushend package with a variety of conference-provided document classes. The use is pretty simple:

\usepackage{flushend}

and that's all it takes. There can occasionally be issues with pdf links being broken across columns.

Answer 3

\usepackage{balance} in the beginning of the latex document, and then add \balance somewhere in the left column text of the last page.