Unexpected Behavior of cuted/strip

Question

when I use cuted/strip, I got no output. The MWE is below:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{cuted}
\begin{document}
\section{Foo}
foo
\section{Bar}
bar
\begin{strip}
baz
\end{strip}
\end{document}

What is the correct way to use this package?

I am using basic-miktex-2.9.5105-x64 on windows 8.1, have tried both pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX.

I think I removed too many blank lines, when posting here. If I do so, it works, strange. When running pdfLaTeX on the following code, it says "No pages of output."

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

\usepackage{cuted}

\begin{document}

\section{Foo}

foo

\section{Bar}

bar

\begin{strip}
baz
\end{strip}

\end{document}

Answer 1

It seems the strip environment requires something after it. Here is a work-around with etoolbox:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{cuted}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\AfterEndEnvironment{strip}{\leavevmode}

\begin{document}

\section{Foo}

foo

\section{Bar}

bar

\begin{strip}
  \centering\color{red} \fbox{baz}
\end{strip}

\end{document} 

Answer 2

I had problems with \strip and struggled a lot with it!

For me, it made some text invisible (probably they were printed behind the formula). Sometimes parts of the text were shown if I typed a few characters after \end{strip} and before next section of the document, but this didn't show all of them!

I ended up leaving \strip, and using multicol package (thanks to another post) which works like a charm.

The trick is that you can define the layout (by default) as one column document, then, in most parts (except the title and wide formulas) change it to two columns:

\begin{document}
\onecolumn
\titlepage or \maketitle

\begin{multicols}{2}
\begin{abstract}
...
%The contents of your paper; anything before the wide formula
\end{multicols}

\begin{equation}
 %Write wide or long equation here ...
\end{equation}

\begin{multicols}{2}
%The rest of the paper; anything after the wide formula ...
\end{multicols} 

\end{document}