Paragraph line break alignment in table

Question

I'm doing the following:

\begin{tabular}{
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
}

  2009 &
  2010 &
  2011 &
  2012 \\

  \hline

  Menores custos &
  Menores custos &
  Liberdade de comercialização &
  Liberdade de comercialização \\

\end{tabular}

And getting the following:

How can I get rid of these big spaces and turn them into into 'normal' spaces, giving a better perspective of left alignment putting the words "Liberdade" and "de" together?

I need to keep these 0.2\textwidth column widths.

Answer 1

Narrow columns are hard to handle; in these cases, one possible alternative is to use use \raggedright columns:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{
    >{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
}

  2009 &
  2010 &
  2011 &
  2012 \\

  \hline

  Menores custos &
  Menores custos &
  Liberdade de comercialização &
  Liberdade de comercialização \\
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

As egreg mentions in his comment, using \RaggedRight from the ragged2e package can be a better option, since now hyphenation is allowed and it outputs less ragged columns:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\usepackage{array}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{
    >{\RaggedRight\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\RaggedRight\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\RaggedRight\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
    >{\RaggedRight\arraybackslash}p{0.20\textwidth}
}

  2009 &
  2010 &
  2011 &
  2012 \\

  \hline

  Menores custos &
  Menores custos &
  Liberdade de comercialização &
  Liberdade de comercialização \\
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Answer 2

You can use raggedright inside p columns.

\documentclass{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
    p{0.20\textwidth}
}

  2009 &
  2010 &
  2011 &
  2012 \\

  \hline

  Menores custos &
  Menores custos &
  \raggedright Liberdade de comercialização &
  \raggedright Liberdade de comercialização 

\end{tabular}

\end{document}