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I am a new user (both to LaTeX & this forum).

I want to create a Comparison Table for an Article (like the one shown here):

enter image description here

Can someone please help me with this.

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1  
Welcome! I think for such tables you need tikz or pstricks. Examples for tikz / pgfplosttable can be found here: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/28087/… – Marco Daniel Aug 17 '12 at 15:26
@billjoy It would be useful to know which part of the table you are struggling with. Marco has already linked to a question about appearance: is that what you are after? – Joseph Wright♦ Aug 17 '12 at 15:48
@Joseph: Yes, I am trying to prepare a table with a similar appearance as in the link provided by Macro. Thanks. – bill joy Aug 17 '12 at 15:56
I thought that making at least a perfectly rectangular table as above might be trivial with TiKZ, but it turns out to be annoyingly difficult to find a simple means of controlling the color of the first column while specifying the colors of the even/odd rows. I would appreciate a sketch of how one might make such tables as an illustrative exercise. – Niel de Beaudrap Aug 17 '12 at 16:17
2  
Yes, it would be great if we could have a live example for this problem. – Sandeep Singh Aug 17 '12 at 16:33
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2 Answers

up vote 10 down vote

I swear somebody said TikZ!

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{PTSansNarrow}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\usetikzlibrary{matrix}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\clip node (m) [matrix,matrix of nodes,
fill=black!20,inner sep=0pt,
nodes in empty cells,
nodes={minimum height=1cm,minimum width=2.6cm,anchor=center,outer sep=0,font=\sffamily},
row 1/.style={nodes={fill=black,text=white}},
column 1/.style={nodes={fill=gray,text=white,align=right,text width=2.5cm,text depth=0.5ex}},
column 2/.style={text width=4cm,align=center,every even row/.style={nodes={fill=white}}},
column 3/.style={text width=3cm,align=center,every even row/.style={nodes={fill=white}},},
row 1 column 1/.style={nodes={fill=gray}},
prefix after command={[rounded corners=4mm] (m.north east) rectangle (m.south west)}
] {
                & Enterprise SAN                     & ioDrive \\
Form Factor     & Rack Applicance (40U $\times$ 20") & Low Profile PCIe \\
Interface       & FC-4                               & PCIe x4 \\
Drive Units     & 150$\times$15 RPM disks            & 2$\times$80gig\\
Data Protection & Mirroring                          & Mirroring\\
Power           & 33.372 kWh/yr                      & 114 kWh/yr\\
SPC-1 I0PS      & 24.998                             & 86.127\\
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

enter image description here

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Ah, nice! this is much better than mine. This time I must delete my answer ;-) – Gonzalo Medina Aug 18 '12 at 21:22
@GonzaloMedina Today we are really on a roll :) – percusse Aug 18 '12 at 21:22
Ohhhhh so close! Can you easily make the first column (inlcuding the first row) entirely grey? – Niel de Beaudrap Aug 19 '12 at 1:30
@NieldeBeaudrap I've deliberately left it out since I think row is better to group but see the edit. – percusse Aug 19 '12 at 7:37
Having now taken time to look at the solution, it's good to know that every even row can be put in a column specification. I see that we get around the non-uniformity of the first column by setting the row styles in the remaining columns; it's a good thing that there aren't many columns. – Niel de Beaudrap Aug 19 '12 at 11:20
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up vote 7 down vote

If you can live without the rounded corners, you can do something like this.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{colortbl}

\begin{document}

\taburowcolors[2]{white .. black!20}

\sffamily\footnotesize
\tabulinesep=6pt
\begin{tabu}{|>{\cellcolor{black!60}\color{white}}r|X[cm]|X[cm]|}
\hline
\rowcolor{black!80}\strut  & \color{white}Enterprise SAN & \color{white}ioDrive \\
Form Factor & Rack Applicance (40U $\times$ 20") & Low Profile PCIe \\
Interface & FC-4 & PCIe x4 \\
Drive Units & 150$\times$15 RPM disks & 2$\times$80gig\\
\hline
\end{tabu}

\end{document}

enter image description here

Rounded corners will probably need some TikZ magic, I'll see if I can come up with something.

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I suspect you could do something with transparencies in PGF, to make a rectangle with an ovoid cutaway. – Niel de Beaudrap Aug 18 '12 at 18:59
@tohecz Right, I tried putting \color{white} in \everyrow but that caused a strange error. Cleaned up the code. – mrf Aug 18 '12 at 20:05

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