I'm far from an expert but I use LaTeX, and I distinctly remember there is some oddity such that you have to put an empty comment at the end of a specific line in the middle of some code that generates multi column figures, or else the layout gets messed up. That sort of thing just shouldn't be possible in anything that has the right to be called "elegant".

Edit: here it is: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/37597

>"The % (between \end{subfigure} and \begin{subfigure} or minipage) is really important; not suppressing it will cause a spurious blank space to be added, the total length will surpass \textwidth and the figures will end up not side-by-side."