line-breaking in longtable

Question

I'm using the longtable environment with the field p{0.5\textwidth}. The text on that field is set with very odd spacing, because latex attempts to justify it both for the left and right column margins. I tried setting \raggedright for the entire document, but this has no effect on the text in the field. Can anyone suggest a quick fix?

Answer 1

If you want to apply this to all p-columns you could consider this:

\usepackage[raggedrightboxes]{ragged2e}

From the documentation:

All \parboxes, minipages, \marginpars and p-columns of tabulars and arrays are automatically set using \RaggedRight.

If you want to apply \RaggedRight only to a particular column, you can insert it into its format definition: >{\RaggedRight}p{0.5\textwidth}.