Displaying a wide figure in a two-column document [duplicate]

Question

It's my first time working with a two-column document (declared as an argument to \documentclass) and I need to put in a very wide figure. The thing is, LaTeX puts it bounded by a column so it either (1) gets truncated, bleeding off the border or [right column] or (2) displays with an awkward text/line wrapping. Is there any way for me to get it to display the way \maketitle does, that is, at the top of the page (ideally) but at least spanning both columns and no awkward line wrapping?

BTW, I use the following code to display my figure:

\begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=6in]{tictac.png}
    \caption{\textsf{The structure of our tic-tac-toe implementation.}}
    \label{fig:ds}
\end{figure}

Answer 1

You need to use the starred version * of the figure environment:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\usepackage{graphicx}% http://ctan.org/pkg/graphicx
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-2]
\begin{figure*}
  \includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=4cm]{tiger}
  \caption{This is a tiger.}
\end{figure*}
\lipsum[3-10]
\end{document}

This will usually flush the figure to the top of the following page, so there's not much control left to the user for movement. However, this may just be dependent on the user output.

In my opinion, you may be better off (for ease of use) with the multicol package. Then you can specify text (and sectional commands) in a multicols environment (with a mandatory argument specifying the number of columns), while specifying your figures in the usual way. The layout is different, since the content flows now with the multicols environment. However, this may also be user preference.

Here's a minimal working example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[showframe]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\usepackage{multicol}% http://ctan.org/pkg/multicols
\usepackage{graphicx}% http://ctan.org/pkg/graphicx
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}
  \lipsum[1-2]
\end{multicols}
\begin{figure*}[h]
  \includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=4cm]{tiger}
  \caption{This is a tiger.}
\end{figure*}
\begin{multicols}{2}
  \lipsum[3-4]
\end{multicols}
\end{document}