multicol: support {1}

[FrankMittelbach]

Brief outline of the bug

old gnats bug report: 4102

I have a suggestion about the multicol package: that {1} column does not render {2} columns. I have several macros that are parameterized by the number of columns to use, and life would be simpler (well, mine ;-) if I had not to work around this behavior.

If backward compatibility is an issue, then you might want to introduce the multicol environment, in addition to multicols. It makes sense to drop the s when accepting 1, and also it would simplify things: I always get it wrong bw the name of the package and that of the environment that it provides :)

Minimal example showing the bug

\RequirePackage{latexbug}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{1}
asdlaksjd laskdj saldkj asldkjas ldjas dlksaj dlkasjd laskjd laskdj
aslkdj asldkjas ldkajs dlkasjd lkasjd laskdj salkdj aslkdja slkdj
aslkdj alsdkj asldkjas ldkjas ldkjas ldkasj dlksajd laskdj asldkjas
ldkajs dlkasjd laskdj aslkdjas lskdjas ldkjas ldkajs dlskaj dlkasjd
laksjd laskdj laskdj asldkj
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

[wspr]

Is this an old one of mine? :) I maintain that even if you treated \begin{multicols}{1} as a dummy environment (basically a no-op) it would be a sensible interface.

[FrankMittelbach]

well you may be a person who wanted this too, but it wasn't who asked for it on gnats

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[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity.

[u-fischer]

@wspr had a gnats report about this too: https://www.latex-project.org/cgi-bin/ltxbugs2html?pr=latex/3749