tabular various issues

Question

I'm new to LaTeX. I'm trying to create a tabular and I'm facing various small issues.

I would like to create a tabular with two columns, the second one being multiline. I found out I can use p{} to achieve that, but the problem is that I now need to specify the width. I would have liked to set it as line width minus whatever space is used by the first column, but I don't know how to do that. edit: so I can use tabularx, but my problem now is that it goes beyond the end of the page:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[top=1in, bottom=1in, left=0pt, right=0pt]{geometry}%margins
\begin{document}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|c|X|}a&b
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Edited to reflect egregs suggestion which fixes your problem (at least on my end):

---

If I understand correctly, you can use the tabularx package for this.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[top=1in, bottom=1in, left=0pt, right=0pt]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}
\centering
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{c X}
    First Column& \lipsum[1]
\end{tabularx}
\end{table}

\end{document}

The syntax is \begin{tabularx}{<desired table width>}{<column spec>} where an X column specifier automatically adjusts the width of that column to fill space so that the entire table is of the desired table width.