How to make a table smaller?

Question

I am going make a table smaller in a paper which I am going to submit to a journal. I used \small but it does not make it small enough ?

Answer 1

With no information or example in your question it is hard to give advice but before choosing font sizes smaller than \small (eg via \tiny or by using \resizebox or \scalebox) you should look at ways to reduce the table width while maintaining the font size (so keeping the data more easily legible, especially on paper which apparently doesn't have a zoom function).

You can reduce the inter-column space with

\setlength\tabcolsep{something}

You can force some columns to be narrower by changing l to

>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{some width}

You can (perhaps) rotate, shrink or re-word the headings if the table headings are forcing the columns to be wider than needed for the data.

Answer 2

with package graphicx:

\noindent
\resizebox{\linewidth}{!}{%
 ... your table code ...
}