4.2a RC1: Bug - Column view doesn't work right around picture

I thought this had been fixed, but evidently not:

Was reading through The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin in 2-column mode, in a tab. Got to page 169, whereupon it suddenly went back to 1 column mode for apparently no reason. I scrolled ahead a bit (several pages; it seemed a long way off) and there was a wide graphic, so that explained why it needed to go to 1-column mode. But I thought that was temporary. It should go back to 2-column mode on its own when I scroll away from that graphic, right? It didn't. It stayed in 1-column mode forever no matter how far beyond the graphic I scrolled (even though 2 was selected on the panel menu next to Columns)

Furthermore, when I tried putting it into 3-column mode (down far enough beyond the graphic for it not to be an issue anymore), it went to 2-column mode, around page 183 and beyond. And it kept popping back into 1-column mode as I scrolled, even though there were no more graphics for the rest of the book.

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Melissa Snyder

According to the 4.2 Beta 4 release notes, unwrappable wide content will still force fewer columns by design. The unwrappable wide graphic in this case is the map of Braddock's Route in 1775 on page 174, which is part of the article "XI. In The Service of The King," consisting of pages 172-186. It appears to wait until you scroll past that article, and the article after it, before resuming the 2-column mode. It doesn't go back into 1-column mode for me after getting past that point. When scrolling up, it seems to wait until the beginning of the article, "IX. A Public-Spirited Gentleman," which is two articles above it, before returning to 2 columns. When I put it in 3-column mode, it remains at 3 columns as I scroll unless I scroll back up to the "XI. In the Service of The King" article again.

This appears to be mostly doing what it is expected to do, although I can check on why it's taking an extra article to get back to the original column setting when scrolling up or down.

Update: This behavior has to due with article caching, which is used to avoid loading articles off disk, which is slower. Any article in the cache which has wide content will force the display to show fewer columns. We cache more than one article at a time, with the number depending on the size of the articles. There is a larger article cache with paged view due to there being more visible text than in non-paged view. There is an open case for improving this behavior.