Use tabularx in LyX instead of default tabular

Question

I recently got into LyX and I’m getting along quite well.

The only thing that bothers me is that LyX’s table feature produces really sloppy-looking tables by default, i.e. double borders and stuff like that.

I would love to tell LyX to use the tabularx environment by default for the tables I enter via the GUI element, so I can get tables with 100% width matching the justified paragraphs. Concerning the borders, I would like to remove all of them but a \toprule above and beneath the first row of the table and a \bottomrule beneath the last row. These features are added by the ctable package which is included in my document preamble. Is there any way I can achieve these things without performing crazy stuff like regex?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I guess you could perform the following two global replacement operations:

• replace all "\end{tabular}" strings with "\end{tabular*}"
• replace all "\begin{tabular}{" strings with "\begin{tabular*}{\textwidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}"

Regarding the replacment of the \hline commands with \toprule, \midrule, and \bottomrule: Whether it's possible to do a global search-and-replace will depend greatly on how you've entered the \hline commands so far. Without detailed knowledge of this aspect, I can't give a suggestion for how to perform this step.

Answer 2

write into the preamble of your document (document->settings->preamble)

\usepackage{array}
\def\tabular{%
 \setlength\dimen@{\linewidth}%
   \edef\@halignto{to\the\dimen@}\@tabular}
\newcolumntype{C}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}c}


then all tables are by default converted into tabular*. Choose for the first column the column type C or write alternetively the definition @{\extracolsep{\fill}}c for the first column via the tabular menu