One column figure blocks text in adjacent column

Question

I am facing this strange problem where a figure in one column of a two-column page is blocking the second column. In other words, text is not going there in other column with a figure in the adjacent column. This happens only when the figure happens to be on top of a page. Any clues?

Answer 1

I've seen this happen when using the dblfloatfix package. I'm not sure why this happens though.

Here's a minimal working example that causes the error for me:

\documentclass[twocolumn,a4paper,10pt]{article}

\usepackage{dblfloatfix}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{times}

\newcommand{\putfig}{
  \begin{figure}[htb]
  \rule{\linewidth}{4cm}
  \caption{Caption}
  \end{figure}
}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-7]
\putfig
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[1-2]
\putfig
\lipsum[1-2]
\putfig
\lipsum[1-5]

\end{document}

Maybe somebody else can elaborate on the cause of this. But please check whether you include that package and whether that might be the culprit.

Answer 2

I was having this same problem, but had been using the stfloats package to serve the purpose of dblfloatfix (i.e. elsewhere in the document, I wanted a double column float at the bottom of the page).

I then added dblfloatfix and the text blocking problem went away (but now with compiler warnings).

I then removed stfloats and now the compiler told me I needed to remove the fix2col package.

I removed the fix2col package and everything seemed to work fine.

Perhaps some of these steps will help someone else with this problem.