Is there any chance that floating figures -- figures that are rendered at the top of the page (usually) -- will get better under a two-column layout? There is some sort of bug in that a big table in a floating object is rendered overlapping with the other column. I had problems with the workaround of putting the table in a single-column paragraph too. And then there's the problem that "professional" breaking algorithm takes prohibitively long to typeset a longer document with several floats (hours?). Perhaps the "medium" breaking algorithm might work well enough if the issue of overlapping was better resolved.

Sorry for not being constructive.

Thank you for TeXmacs,

Łukasz