I am going make a table smaller in a paper which I am going to submit to a journal. I used \small but it does not make it small enough ?
[Tex/LaTex] How to make a table smaller
longtabletables
Related Solutions
You can modify the horizontal width of a table using a number of choices:
- Manual inter-column separation using, for example,
\begin{tabular}{@{10}{@{\hspace{<len>}}c@{\hspace{<len>}}}} % Inter-column gap of <len>
Modify commands like
\tabcolsepor\extracolsepto adjust the inter-column separation.Resizing the entire table to fit within the line width via the
graphicxpackage\resize{<h-len>}{<v-len>}{<stuff>}command:
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{...}
...
\end{tabular}%
}%
- Use fixed-width tabulars. This could be using the
tabular*environment, or usingtabularxfrom thetabularxpackage. The latter provides a stretchable column specifierX. However, none of these will shrink the table to fit into\linewidthif the table is wider than\linewidth. For example:
\begin{tabular*}{\linewidth}{<column specs>}
...
\end{tabular*}
\usepackage{tabularx}% http://ctan.org/pkg/tabularx
...
\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{<column specs>}
...
\end{tabularx}
- Use a different font, say
\small. However, this gives the entire table a different look/feel compared to the rest of the document. Not recommended.
Read more about this on the fixed-width tables entry on the UK TeX FAQ.
For adjusting the vertical length of your table, you can try one of the following:
Adjust the vertical length using the
\resizebox{<h-len>}{<v-len>}{<stuff>}command in a similar fashion than described above. This time, set<h-len>=!to maintain aspect ratio.Modifying the
\arraystretchparameter using something like\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{0.8}Specify a manual line-skip by using
\\[<len>]instead of just\\to produce new tabular lines. This gives you some control over how big the skip between rows are.
If you really want to make sure your table becomes unreadable, you can use the \fontsize command to set the font size to whatever you like:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lmodern,blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blindtext
\begin{table}[!h]
\fontsize{4}{4}\selectfont
\begin{tabular}{lllllll}
\hline
hat & einer & gemacht zu & werden um von & Buch Wollen & unter & auch so weiter \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\fontsize{1}{1}\selectfont
\Blindtext
\end{document}
Best Answer
With no information or example in your question it is hard to give advice but before choosing font sizes smaller than
\small(eg via\tinyor by using\resizeboxor\scalebox) you should look at ways to reduce the table width while maintaining the font size (so keeping the data more easily legible, especially on paper which apparently doesn't have a zoom function).You can reduce the inter-column space with
You can force some columns to be narrower by changing
ltoYou can (perhaps) rotate, shrink or re-word the headings if the table headings are forcing the columns to be wider than needed for the data.