Problem balancing two column memoir

Question

I have a problem using \balance on this document:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt,twocolumn]{memoir}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{balance}

\balance

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

I have no problem with book and article, but with memoir document class the first line of text is moved down, like in the the MWE:

I can't use multicols because it can not handle float on single column. I'm using pdflatex on Fedora 17. Anyone have some suggestions?

Answer 1

With article instead of memoir, the balance package seems to cause different problems -- there's an empty line at the bottom of the first column. Besides that (and as in your example), the line-spacing after the first line of the second column is wrong.

Solution: Use the flushend package instead. (Note that, according to the UK TeX FAQ, it's "a dangerous piece of code".)

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

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{flushend}

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}