### 1-column abstract in 2-column document

One often requires that the abstract of a paper should appear across the entire page, even in a two-column paper. The required trick is:

      \documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
      ...
      \begin{document}
      ... % \author, etc
      \twocolumn[
        \begin{@twocolumnfalse}
          \maketitle
          \begin{abstract}
            ...
          \end{abstract}
        \end{@twocolumnfalse}
      ]

Unfortunately, with the above `\thanks` won't work in the `\author` list. If you need such specially-numbered footnotes, you can make them like this:

      \title{Demonstration}
      \author{Me, You\thanks{}}
      \twocolumn[
        ... as above ...
      ]
      {
        \renewcommand{\thefootnote}%
          {\fnsymbol{footnote}}
        \footnotetext[1]{Thanks for nothing}
      }

and so on.

As an alternative, among other facilities the abstract package provides a `\saythanks` command and a `onecolabstract` environment which remove the need to fiddle with the `\thanks` and footnoting. They can be used like this:

    \twocolumn[
      \maketitle             % full width title
      \begin{onecolabstract} % full width abstract
      ... text
      \end{onecolabstract}
    ]
    \saythanks               % typeset any \thanks

`abstract.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/abstract (zip, browse)

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