### Wide figures in two-column documents

Floating figures and tables ordinarily come out the same width as the page, but in two-column documents they’re restricted to the width of the column. This is sometimes not good enough; so there are alternative versions of the float environments — in two-column documents, `figure*` provides a floating page-wide figure (and `table*` a page-wide table) which will do the necessary.

The “`*`”ed float environments can only appear at the top of a page, or on a whole page — `h` or `b` float placement directives are simply ignored.

Unfortunately, page-wide equations can only be accommodated inside float environments. You should include them in `figure` environments, or use the float or ccaptionpackage to define a new float type.

`ccaption.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/ccaption (gzipped tar, browse)
`float.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/float (gzipped tar, browse)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=widefigs