How to produce a double column document in Latex?

Question

I want to write double column document and I used this command \documentclass[twoside]{article} but it is not working, I do not know what is wrong and why it is disabled.

Answer 1

The twoside option is not about placing text in a multicolumn fashion. While oneside is typical for articles and reports, the twoside option is loaded when you want to have a double-sided document, allowing you to set the margins, asymmetrically, in order to bind the document as a book.

If you want to place text in multiple columns, you can:

• add the twocolumn option to your document class.
• add \twocolumn before the text you want to split into two columns. Later you can add \onecolumn to get back to the standard one column.
• load the multicol package, and then enclose the text you want in two (or more) columns within its environment, like \begin{multicols}{#}...\end{multicols}. You don't need to specify one column after this. The # symbolizes the number of columns the text will split into.

Note that you can combine some of these. Adding the twocolumn class option and using the multicols environment, will cause the text inside the latter to appear in the first half (left) of the page.