Float spanning columns in LaTeX

Use figure* and table* to produce floats which spans across both the columns in a two column article

diff/patch

copied from http://kegel.com/academy/opensource.html

Making Patches

To create a patch, you run a program called diff, and save its output to a file. For instance, if the original source tree is in directory "foobar.old", and your new sources are in directory "foobar.new", the command

diff -Naur foobar.old foobar.new > blarg.patch

will create the file 'blarg.patch' containing your changes in 'unified context diff' format.

Using Patches

To use a patch -- that is, to automatically carry out the changes described in a patch file -- you run a program called patch. For instance, if you're trying to apply the patch 'blarg.patch' to a package called foobar-0.17, you might say

cd foobar-0.17; patch -p1 < ../blarg.patch

That would merge the changes from blarg.patch into your source tree. (The -p1 tells patch to ignore the first directory in filenames in the patch; that way a patch generated against the directory foobar-0.11 will still apply properly.)

indentations

So, you can either get rid of GNU emacs, or change it to use saner
values.  To do the latter, you can stick the following in your .emacs file:

(defun linux-c-mode ()
 "C mode with adjusted defaults for use with the Linux kernel."
 (interactive)
 (c-mode)
 (c-set-style "K&R")
 (setq c-basic-offset 8))

use -kr and -i8 options with indent

(stands for "K&R, 8 character indents"). 

Spacing in Math Mode (LaTeX)

n a math environment, LaTeX ignores the spaces you type and puts in the spacing that it thinks is best. LaTeX formats mathematics the way it's done in mathematics texts. If you want different spacing, LaTeX provides the following four commands for use in math mode:

1. \; - a thick space

2. \: - a medium space

3. \, - a thin space

4. \! - a negative thin space