Last-page column equalization for latex IEEEtran class?

Question

In the documentation for the IEEEtran LaTeX class, it's mentioned that the two columns on the last page need to be manually adjusted in order to be balanced (have the same length).

I see that \newpage will allow me to break the first column so the rest of the content is on the second column. This allows for paragraph-level equalization, and looks good, but I'm having trouble with line-level equalization, that is, breaking the column by lines instead of by paragraphs.

When I insert \newpage in the middle of a paragraph (instead of between paragraphs), LaTeX effectively splits the paragraph in two. The second part goes to the top of the second column (as desired) and the first part remains in the first column. There are two issues I've found with this, and I've only solved one of them.

The first issue is that the partial paragraph on the top of the second column is treated by LaTeX as a new paragraph, so it's indented. I fixed this by adding \noindent after \newpage so that it's not indented.

The second issue is that for the partial paragraph in the first column, the paragraph is justified (as expected), but the last line is ragged (no justification). Is there a way to force justification of this last line? LaTeX has environments and commands to disable justification, but I can't find anything to fully justify a paragraph, including the last line.

Answer 1

Two possibilities:

1. Ending a line with \linebreak will force the line to be justified, no matter how empty it is.

   To do what you are trying to do you could replace \newpage \noindent with \linebreak \newpage \noindent. Note this will create a blank line before the end of the page, which may or may not be a problem. In certain cases it could create an empty page between your pages.

2. Another option would be \pagebreak. It tells LaTeX to start a new page when you get to the end of the current line. You don't have control of the exact word where the page break occurs.