LaTeX does not adjust font size

Question

Does anyone has a clue why LaTeX won't adjust the font size (I changed it to 10pt, 12pt, 5pt but nothing happened):

\documentclass[10pt,landscape]{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[german]{babel}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{lscape}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{enumitem}% for control of list spaceing
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}%coloring rows in tabluar
\usepackage{subfig}%for subfloat
\begin{document}
\newcolumntype{R}[1]{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}m{#1}}% alignment: centered
\newcommand{\nodata}{\centering\arraybackslash --} %für -- in Tabellen

\begin{appendix}

\section{Cluster data}
\subsection{quarterly data}

%GDP
\subsubsection{Gross domestic product}

\begin{tabular}{R{3.5cm}R{3.5cm}R{3.5cm}R{3.5cm}}     %<--- damit geht es jetzt auch ;)
\toprule
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cluster 1}} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cluster 2}} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cluster 3}} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cluster 4}} \\ 
\midrule

\rowcolor[gray]{.9}  Canada, France, Germany & Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States &\nodata &\nodata\\

  Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland &\nodata & Luxembourg &\nodata\\

\rowcolor[gray]{.9}  Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden & Denmark, Ireland &\nodata &\nodata\\

 \nodata & Estonia, Hungary & Czech Republic, Slovenia & Poland, Slovak Republic \\

\rowcolor[gray]{.9}  Greece, Portugal, Spain &\nodata &\nodata &\nodata \\

  New Zealand &\nodata & Australia, Korea, Turkey & Israel \\

\bottomrule
\end{tabular}


%Plots

$\begin{array}{llll}
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{GDPClusterPlot1.eps} & \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{GDPClusterPlot2.eps} & \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{GDPClusterPlot3.eps} & \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{GDPClusterPlot4.eps}
 \\
\end{array}$

\end{appendix}

\end{document}

Answer 1

Please note that the options 10pt, 11pt, and 12pt of the \documentclass command set the default font size for the entire document. Some document classes, notably the memoir class, recognize additional settings for the default size of the text fonts. However, no document classes I'm familiar with recognize the 5pt option.)

To reduce the font size locally, e.g., just for a tabular environment that's too large to fit into the text block, LaTeX provides the commands \small, \footnotesize, \scriptsize, and \tiny. These instructions are relative to the document's main font size: the \small instruction reduces the font size by about 10 percent, while the \tiny instruction does so by about 50 percent. Hence, if you've specified 12pt as the default font size and if you're using one of the "standard" LaTeX document classes such as article, report, and book (or one of the document classes that are based on the standard classes), text set in a \tiny group will we rendered at 6pt.

To limit the scope of the fontsize change to the tabular environment in question, you should delimit the part of the document with a pair of curly braces, { and }. Hence, your tabular environment might now look like this:

{\footnotesize % change the font size
\begin{tabular}{ *{4}{R{3.5cm}} }
...
\end{tabular} 
} % end of scope of \footnotesize macro

Finally, if you encase the tabular environment inside a table environment, you needn't even use the braces to keep the fontsize-changing command local. Just issue the command \small, \footnotesize, etc. immediately after the begin{table} instruction (and before the \begin{tabular}{...} instruction, and the command's scope will end automatically at the \end{table} statement.