[Tex/LaTex] Make a table span multiple pages

longtablepage-breakingtables

I have a table that takes up a full page, but I want it to start on a page that already has some text and then continue onto the next page (i.e. it's ok if the table gets broken up and spans two pages). It is a simple two column table:

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} 
\hline
foo & bar \\ \hline 
foo & bar \\ \hline 
...
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

I guess I need longtable? How do I use it?

Best Answer

There are a few options described in How can I make a table that takes up more than a single page?

I've put a MWE below using the longtable package; I deliberately didn't put the longtable in the table environment so that it wouldn't float, and would show that it breaks across pages.

As described in @Werner's comment, the documentation has a lot of detail. 

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{lipsum} % just for dummy text- not needed for a longtable

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[1]

%\begin{table}[h] 
%\centering
\begin{longtable}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} 
\hline
foo & bar \\ \hline 
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
\caption{Your caption here} % needs to go inside longtable environment
\label{tab:myfirstlongtable}
\end{longtable}
%\end{table} 

Table \ref{tab:myfirstlongtable} shows my first longtable.
\end{document}

As a side note, some folks would advocate against using vertical lines in a table- that's a separate discussion though :) Have a look at Why not use vertical lines ('|') in a tabular?

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