heightpage-breakingtableswidth
I have a table that I want to insert on a page, but at least one (perhaps both) of the following conditions are met:
The table is too wide to fit within the text block or page. That is, I'm exceeding some horizontal restriction.
The table is too tall to fit within the text block or page. That is, I'm exceeding some vertical restriction.
What are my options to make this table fit? If it doesn't fit, regardless of my attempts, what other options exist?
You can either fix the column width by specifying a paragraph style p{<len>}, or you can use a different tabular environment that stretches according to the contents up to the maximum width of the text block. The latter is provided by the tabularx package which defines the environment tabularx with an additional width-of-table argument, as well as the stretchable X column specifier.
An example of the first suggestion:
\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=15mm,right=15mm, top=1cm, bottom=2cm]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{tabular}{|l|c|p{0.7\linewidth}|}
\hline
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\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
An example of the second suggestion:
\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=15mm,right=15mm, top=1cm, bottom=2cm]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{tabularx}% http://ctan.org/pkg/tabularx
\begin{document}
\noindent\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{|l|c|X|}
\hline
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\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}
The tabularx approach is an easy way out since you don't have to worry about specifying a column width that exactly matches the remaining column space on the page. However, it is possible to calculate the appropriate value of <len> when using the p{<len>} column specifier.
In response to part 2 of the user's question:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\parindent 0in\parskip 1ex
\begin{document}
Textwidth:\\
\rule{\textwidth}{0.3ex}\par
First, let's create an oversized table:\par
\def\x{%
\begin{tabular}{|p{2in}|p{2in}|p{1.5in}|}
\hline
First column & Second column & Third Column \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
}
\x\par
Now I will scale the table to 79 percent of original\par
\scalebox{.79}{\x}
\end{document}
Best Answer
Let's first identify what we're referring to when we use the term "table". The typical
tableenvironment is a float, and can contain anything: a paragraph of text, an image, or even atabular. Working with the latter - atabular- and how to adjust it is what is discussed here. The discussion also applies toarraystructures since they provide a math analogue totabular.Consider reading How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX? if you're interested in float-specific placements.
Secondly, understand that a
tabularis a static, two-dimensional construction. As such, it's probably best-suited for representing two dimensions (like age x gender, or region x type). Representing anything more than two dimension may therefore inherently be problematic if not presented "carefully," since the number of elements to tabulate expands geometrically. If you're presenting (say) three dimensions of information by (say) age, gender and ethnicity and the table doesn't fit, perhaps consider breaking this single table into atabularby age and gender for each ethnicity. Remember that tables should extend or ease the digestion of the information, so if its representation seems complex, dense or confusing, separation into more elementary components might be your best option.###1. My table/
tabularis too wide. What can I do to make it fit?The following are possible options to consider (in no particular order):
Manual stacking may be tedious. Setting a column heading a fixed-width
p{<len>}-column is a way of providing an automated way of line-breaking (also shown above).paragraph-style column specification. Thisp{<len>}-style column wraps at<len>. If you don't know what<len>should be,tabularxcan help with its flexibleX-column:Justified wrapping within the
X-columns may cause overfull\hboxwarnings, which may be avoided by using a\raggedrightsetting. Sincetabularxloadsarray, column prefixes>{<prefix>}can be added.tabularyprovides a similar interface and may also be helpful in this regard.Rotational formatting is fairly extreme visually and should be used sparingly.
tabularis smaller, width-fittingtabulars. It's the least invasive visually (in general) and perhaps airs out the information for better reader digestion:tabulars. However, if you don't want to remove the content yet still remove a column(s), read Easiest way to delete a column?.\tabcolsepto be6pt. Forarrays the length used is\arraycolsepwith a default of5pt. This may be more than you need. For a multi-columntabular, reducing the\tabcolsepcould save you valuable points.It may be required to limit the scope of the change to
\tabcolsep, hence the use of grouping the\setlengthadjustment (via\begingroup...\endgroupor{...}).tabular. If using the default\normalsizefor your document, perhaps\smallor\footnotesizemight make it fit:See What is the default font size of a LaTeX document? and What point (pt) font size are \Large etc.? for a discussion on fonts and font sizes.
It may be required to limit the scope of the change to the font, hence the use of grouping (via
\begingroup...\endgroupor{...}).tabulars, you can resize the entire table to fit within your bounds horizontally using\resizebox{<width>}{<height>}{<tabular>}where<width>is at most\linewidthor\textwidth(see Difference between \textwidth, \linewidth and \hsize). The notation!for<height>will ensure that the aspect ratio of the resizing is kept.Scaling the
tabularshrinks all the content... text included. If the factor of shrinking is small enough, there may not be a noticeable different between the fonts used in the document and the scaledtabular.tabularcan butt into the margin(s) because any of the above changes are just not sufficient for your needs. However, the default\centeringdoesn't set thetabularin a centred way, so you can set thetabularinside a\makebox[<width>]of small enough<width>(less than\linewidth) which will automatically centre it within the margin span (see How can I center a too wide table?):tabularfit. This, however, would be an extreme adjustment as you're requesting your audience to adjust their point of view and some people may not enjoy this switch between horizontal (left-to-right) and vertical (bottom-to-top) setting:graphicx's\rotatebox{<angle>}{<tabular>}is used to rotate the<tabular>by<angle>degrees.The above example rotates the
tabularonly, leaving the caption in its original place. If you want to rotate the entire float - caption included, you can use asidewaystable(provided by therotatingpackage):Note that a
sidewaystableassumes your table is fairly wide and therefore will occupy most of the text block height during rotation. As such, the default behaviour is to place it on a page of its own.###2. My table/
tabularis too tall. What can I do to make it fit?Many of the same procedures listed above can be applied vertically in order to adjust your
tabularlayout, like font changes, rotation or manually breaking content into multipletabulars; some suggestions are listed below.\arraystretchis used to stretch (or shrink) each row within atabular. Perhaps your\documentclassincreased this. You can adjust it using\renewcommand:tabular:Again, here, scoping might be required to limit font changes.
graphicx's\scalebox{<factor>}or\resizebox{<width>}{<height>}is an option. You can specify an appropriate height-fitting<height>length or portion. A<width>of!ensures to maintain the aspect ratio during resizing:tabularis just too tall, you can consider breaking it across the page boundary manually (that is, setting separatetabulars to fit on each page). This may require the use of separate floats (and perhaps continued captions as well). However, there are packages that can assist with such automated breaking:longtable,supertabular,ltxtable,xltabularandxtabare a couple such packages. More packages are listed on CTAN. Also see How can I make a table that takes up more than a single page? or Make a table span multiple pages.The following example is taken directly from the
longtabledocumentation and illustrates the construction of thelongtableenvironment components in order to break a table across multiple pages (with a "continued caption"):###3. My
tabularis too wide and too tall for where I placed it. What can I do?Typically one can combine the above methods for width/height improvements. There may be some incompatible choices (like resizing a
longtable, for example).