Boxing some cells in tabular enviroment

Question

I would like to make a table in LaTeX, where I box some of the cells within my table. And I would like to be able to nest boxes so that I can have a box in a box. Here I have an example of what I mean:

I have searched for this problem for some time, and I doesn't seem like I am capable of finding a solution to this problem, and I don't know how to attack the problem, since I'm pretty new to LaTeX.

Answer 1

There are perhaps many ways of doing this, depending on how you may want to extend this. I've used an array since the arrangement in your question looks pretty tabular-like:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\[\begin{array}{l|cclc|l}
  \multicolumn{1}{l}{1.} & \quad & & \forall x\forall y : P(x,y) & \multicolumn{1}{c}{\quad} & \mbox{premise} \\ \cline{2-5}
  2. & & u_0 & \forall y : P(u_0,y) && \forall e \\ \cline{3-4}
  3. & & \multicolumn{1}{|c}{v_0} & P(u_0,v_0) & \multicolumn{1}{|c|}{} & \forall e \\ \cline{3-4}
  4. & & & \forall v : P(u_0,v) && \forall i \\ \cline{2-5}
  \multicolumn{1}{l}{5.} & & & \forall u\forall v : P(u,v) &\multicolumn{1}{c}{} & \forall i
\end{array}\]
\end{document}​

Columns 2 and 5 are just place-holders, specified as centred; they only contain the entry \quad for spacing purposes.

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tabular creation in LaTeX is tedious for large constructions. There are a couple of GUIs that could be of help:

1. excel2latex

   

   The default is to include \bigstruts, which requires the bigstrut package. Also, you may want to modify the default tabular output to array, and wrap it inside a display math environment \[...\].

2. Gnumeric which allows exporting spreadsheet-like constructions to LaTeX.

3. ...see more at Comprehensive list of tools that simplify the generation of LaTeX tables.