Tables with lots of text in LaTeX often lead to tables that do not fit on a page. This post shows how to produce tables with automatic line breaks. Here is a simple example of a badly formatted table:
The tabularx package has the possibility to break lines automatically by using the column specifier X:
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\begin{table}[!htbp] \centering \begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{lX} \toprule Number & Description \\ \midrule 1 & This is a mighty long text that could go over multiple lines but in a normal table is shown on one line and therefore the table does not fit on the page \\ 2 & This is a mighty long text that could go over multiple lines but in a normal table is shown on one line and therefore the table does not fit on the page \\ 3 & This is a mighty long text that could go over multiple lines but in a normal table is shown on one line and therefore the table does not fit on the page \\ \bottomrule \end{tabularx}% \label{tab:addlabel}% \caption{A table with line breaks} \end{table}% |
This results in the following table:
Another option is defining a new command to let you set the width of the columns:
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% left fixed width: \newcolumntype{L}[1]{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{#1}} % center fixed width: \newcolumntype{C}[1]{>{\centering\arraybackslash}p{#1}} % flush right fixed width: \newcolumntype{R}[1]{>{\raggedleft\arraybackslash}p{#1}} |
This new type has the nice feature that you can define the width of the columns yourself. It can be used as follows:
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\begin{table}[!htbp] \centering \begin{tabular}{L{1cm}L{9cm}} ... |
with the following result:
