LaTeX: Automatic two-column wrapping of content

Question

Say I have a list of words that need to retain their order, and need to be sorted into two columns.

I can do this rather well with a tabular:

\begin{tabular}{l l}
abc & def \\
ghi & jkl \\
\end{tabular}

But doing so makes it rather difficult and time consuming to reorder the list.

Is it possible to have an automatically wrapped two-column list? Ideally, I would like to simply enter an ordered list:

\begin{magic}
abc \\
def \\
ghi \\
jkl \\
\end{magic}

And have it wrapped to two columns (as the tabular enables):

abc  def
ghi  jkl

Answer 1

You might be better off with creating the table in some other program and using a script or export function to convert it to a LaTeX table. The longtable package will allow that table to wrap across multiple pages.

Answer 2

Try the multicol environment. Not sure if this is what you want, but

\begin{multicols}{2}
\begin{itemize}
\item abc
\item def
% etc
\end{itemize}
\end{multicols}

will wrap the list into two cols. You need to \usepackage{multicol} i think, but it might be multicols. I should also note that you can use \begin{multicols*}{2} to create similar environment, but with a different property: \begin{multicols} creates columns and balances them equally, but \begin{multicols*} creates columns and fills the first before going to the second (so won't always be 'balanced', which is more ideal for papers).

Answer 3

Second attempt, tested:

\def\word{\let\word\rightword \message{First}}
\def\leftword{\\ \let\word\rightword \message{Left}}
\def\rightword{\> \let\word\leftword \message{Right}}
\begin{tabbing}
\hskip 3in \=\\
% Items
\word One
\word Two
\word Three
\end{tabbing}

This version is indeed ugly. A negative vskip after the \\ in the tabbing env would be a good thing. This can be adapted to use the \\s in your 'magic' environment.