Temporarily suppress two-column layout in Oxford Bioinformatics template

Question

The Oxford Bioinformatics journal's template is one of my favorites and I use it for many of my school assignments. The template uses a two-column layout, but in an appendix at the end of the document I would like to include some source code. This of course looks horrible in the two-column layout, but I have been unable to suppress the two-column mode using multicol macros. Is there any way I can do this?

Answer 1

Just put \onecolumn before the appendix. Note that the commands \onecolumn and \twocolumn start a new page.

Answer 2

You can put your source code inside a starred version of figure which will span both the columns in a two column document ( a misuse but for good).

\usepackage{graphicx} 
\begin{figure*}
  \begin{verbatim}
  Your source code here.
  \end{verbatim}
  \caption{The source code for bla bla bla}
  \label{source-1}
\end{figure*}

But these starred versions will either put the figure in a new page of their own or at the top of the page. (htbp do not work so neatly) To cure this one can load

\usepackage{dblfloatfix} 

in the preamble. Then the place holders option [tbp] can be used to put the figure at top, bottom of the page or in a new page. But [h] will still not be available.

Reference: wikibook

Answer 3

Insert the following in the preamble to be able to have full width code, and multicolumn text:

\usepackage{xcolor,listings,etoolbox,multicol,lipsum}
\lstnewenvironment{Code}[1][]
 {\lstset{language=[LaTeX]TeX}\lstset{%
      breaklines=true,
      framesep=5pt,
      basicstyle=\ttfamily,
      showstringspaces=false,
      keywordstyle=\ttfamily\textcolor{blue},
      stringstyle=\color{orange},
     commentstyle=\color{black},
     rulecolor=\color{gray!10},
      breakatwhitespace=true,
     showspaces=false,  % shows spacing symbol
     xleftmargin=0pt,
     xrightmargin=5pt,
     aboveskip=0pt, % compact the code looks ugly in type
     belowskip=0pt,  % user responsible to insert any skips
      backgroundcolor=\color{gray!15}, #1
}}
{}
\makeatletter
%% Hack to have one column environments for Code
\def\multicols@string{multicols}
\BeforeBeginEnvironment{Code}{%
  \ifx\@currenvir\multicols@string
     \xdef\resume@multicols{\noexpand\begin{multicols}{\number\col@number}}%
    \end{multicols}%
  \else
    \global\let\resume@multicols\@empty
  \fi}
\AfterEndEnvironment{Code}{\resume@multicols}
\makeatother

In the Appendix code is written as:

\onecolumn
\begin{multicols}{2}
\lipsum[2]
\begin{Code}
  ......
\end{Code}
\end{multicols}

As a general suggestion add text in between code fragments rather than a long code listing it will look better.