[Tex/LaTex] Table doesn’t fit to page width properly

formattingtables

The table produced by this code always goes out off the width of my page. I want the table to fit within the width of the page. I tried giving extra \\ in between but it made it worse only.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
\hline 
 LocationProvider & Description \\ 
 \hline 
 network & Uses the mobile network or WI-Fi to determine the best location.Might have a higher precision in closed rooms than GPS. \\
\hline 
gps & Use the GPS receiver in the Android device to determine the best location via satellites. Usually better precision than network. \\
\hline 
passive & Allows to participate in location of updates of other components to save energy \\ 
\hline 
\end{tabular}

The result:
enter image description here

Best Answer

"l" means left aligned so everything in the cell comes out in a single row and if you have a lot of material you end up exceeding the available width on your page.

Alternatives:

use p{<width>} on one or more columns to have the text inside wrap the the specified <width>
or use the package tabularx which allows you to get the column width for wrapping columns be determined automatically (see package documentation how to do this)
in some cases using a slightly smaller font for the table might be a choice, but in general I would not recommend this.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] \multicolumn table cell doesn’t fit page width

You could use the tabularx package and its eponymous tabularx environment. The only tricky part is how to get the width of the 2-column term: To calculate the allowable width, you have to subtract from \textwidth the following items: 2\tabcolsep, to account for the whitespace at the left and right hand edges, and 0.8pt (=2*0.4pt), for the widths of the two vertical lines.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,tabularx}
\newcolumntype{Y}{>{\centering\arraybackslash}X} % centered version of "X" column type
\begin{document}
\noindent
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|c|Y|}
  \hline
  \multicolumn{2}{|p{\dimexpr\textwidth-2\tabcolsep-0.8pt}|}{\lipsum[2]}\\
  \hline
   text text text text text text & text text text text\\
  \hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Addendum: If you want the two columns to have equal width (and still have their contents centered), just replace the c with a Y in the second argument of the tabularx specification:

enter image description here

[Tex/LaTex] fit table on page width

Please always post complete small documents that show the problem. It is hard to offer advice for such a frament however

\begin{table}[H]

avoid using H as it disables the float mechanism (which is the whole point of the table environment)

{1.8\textwidth}{2\textheight}

You should avoid scaling tables as it makes inconsistent font sizes, better to use \small or another suitable size (I see you have tried \scriptsize but teh \resizebox would negate any effects of the size change. But here you are scaling the table to be twice as big as the page so it has no chance of fitting.

You are using c columns which are as wide as their widest entry, perhaps you want p{1cm} columns for some width, to allow text in the entries to wrap to multiple lines. It is impossible to say given your fragment.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] \multicolumn table cell doesn’t fit page width

[Tex/LaTex] fit table on page width

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