[Tex/LaTex] Left justified, fixed width columns in table not working correctly

tables

Thanks to this answer I can create left justified fixed width columns in my table. However, I would like to ask if anyone else has encountered the problems with the last column not working as it should, for example:

\begin{table}
\caption{Device technical specifications summary.}
\begin{tabular}{|R{3cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|R{3cm}|}
\hline
~ & Samsung Galaxy Pocket Neo & Samsung S3 Mini & Vodafone Smart4 Mini & Google (Asus) Nexus 7 (2012) \\
\hline
CPU Speed [MHz] & 850 & 1000 & 1300  & 1200 \\
\hline
CPU Type & 1 Core & 2 Core Coretex-A9 & 2 Core Cortex-A7 & 4 Core Cortex-A9 \\
\hline
RAM [MB] & 512 & 1024 & 512 & 1024 \\ 
\hline
Release Year & 2013 & 2012 & 2014 & 2012 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\label{Device technical specifications summary}
\end{table}

Everything works fine with
\begin{tabular}{|R{3cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|p{3cm}|}

But if as it was set out above, I get:

Errors: ./contents/Chap-6.tex:40: Misplaced \noalign. [\hline]

i.e. giving me problems starting with the first \hline.

Any advice?

Best Answer

This works fine for me: (copied the column types verbatim from the link you provided, which I presume is what you did)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}
\newcolumntype{L}[1]{>{\raggedright\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}
\newcolumntype{C}[1]{>{\centering\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}
\newcolumntype{R}[1]{>{\raggedleft\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}


\begin{document}

\begin{table}
\caption{Device technical specifications summary.\label{Device technical specifications summary}}
\begin{tabular}{|R{3cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|R{2cm}|R{3cm}|}
\hline
~ & Samsung Galaxy Pocket Neo & Samsung S3 Mini & Vodafone Smart4 Mini & Google (Asus) Nexus 7 (2012) \\
\hline
CPU Speed [MHz] & 850 & 1000 & 1300  & 1200 \\
\hline
CPU Type & 1 Core & 2 Core Coretex-A9 & 2 Core Cortex-A7 & 4 Core Cortex-A9 \\
\hline
RAM [MB] & 512 & 1024 & 512 & 1024 \\ 
\hline
Release Year & 2013 & 2012 & 2014 & 2012 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Fixed column-width table with text left-aligned in cells

You could use the array package and let it insert \raggedright commands. A comfortable way is to define a new column type:

\usepackage{array}
\newcolumntype{P}[1]{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{#1}}

Now just use P instead of p to get left justified p columns.

Instead of \raggedright, you could also use the enhanced command \RaggedRight of the ragged2e package, which allows hyphenation. Further \arraybackslash, which restores the behavior of \ (changed by \raggedright), is no longer needed.

So, my preferred way would be

\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\newcolumntype{P}[1]{>{\RaggedRight\hspace{0pt}}p{#1}}

I'm further inserting \hspace{0pt} because otherwise there could be hyphenation problems: TeX doesn't hyphenate the first word in a box. Inserting zero space works around that.

[Tex/LaTex] Table column fixed width does not fire

Your l column specification is causing this: p{5cm} will fix the width of that column to 5cm and break the lines as expected. However, l, r and c columns do not break.

You may be interested in using the tabularx package's tabularx environment rather. It provides an X column specification that breaks (like p{<len>}), but spreads out to fill some pre-specified width. The usage resembles

\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{p{5cm}Xp{5cm}}
  % Your tabular stuff here
\end{tabularx}

In the above code snippet, the table will be \linewidth wide, with the X-column filling up whatever is left of \linewidth-10cm (and some column spacing).

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Fixed column-width table with text left-aligned in cells

[Tex/LaTex] Table column fixed width does not fire

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