[Tex/LaTex] Altering cell colour hides cell border in LyX

colorcolortbllyxtables

I'm probably doing something simple wrong, but I'm having the following problem. I've got a table with two columns, on the left there are multirows with coloured cells, on the right there are normal cells which are each coloured individually. Hopefully this is clear in the following pictures:

lyx table

pdf table

As you can see, the cells on the right in the generated table do not have the correct borders, even though they seem to be fine in LyX.

Does anybody know what might be causing this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Without seeing the tex markup generated it is hard to be sure but especially if it prints OK but just looks bad on screen then it is most likely just an artifact of your pdf viewer. TeX positions the lines from hline and the rules for the coloured backgrounds very exactly but the viewer has to snap them to pixel boundaries and if this can cause the background to obscure a thin rule. Try increasing \arrayrulewidth to reduce the effect.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Use tabularx in LyX instead of default tabular

write into the preamble of your document (document->settings->preamble)

\usepackage{array}
\def\tabular{%
 \setlength\dimen@{\linewidth}%
   \edef\@halignto{to\the\dimen@}\@tabular}
\newcolumntype{C}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}c}

then all tables are by default converted into tabular*. Choose for the first column the column type C or write alternetively the definition @{\extracolsep{\fill}}c for the first column via the tabular menu

[Tex/LaTex] Cell colouring a multirow in LyX

The method suggested by Gonzalo Medina in a comment works also in LyX.

Having created your table, add an ERT (TeX code box, with Ctrl + L) and type \cellcolor{LightGreen} in the first cell that your multirow should cover. Copy this ERT to the rest of the cells, and in the bottom one, write \multirow{-8}{2.5cm}{<your text>} after the \cellcolor. Note the negative number in the first argument.

In addition, you have to remove the lines above/below the cells that are part of the multirow with the buttons on the toolbar:

enter image description here

If not, the lines will be above the colored area.

LyX and PDF-view (click to enlarge):

A final note (you are probably aware of this):

Unless the multirow feature in LyX has been used elsewhere, you have to add that package to the preamble, in Document --> Settings --> LaTeX preamble. The xcolor package with the table option must be loaded to be able to color the cells:

\usepackage{multirow} 
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Use tabularx in LyX instead of default tabular

[Tex/LaTex] Cell colouring a multirow in LyX

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