3 small questions:
1) I'd like to put a soft \midrule in this table between Care type and the headers, but I'd like it to not quite reach the edge of the table: (at your discretion to mess with the layout of table )
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{booktabs}
%\usepckage{Something extra}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}[!ht]
\centering\makebox[\textwidth]
{\resizebox{1.1\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabularx}{1.2\textwidth}{*6X}
\toprule
\multicolumn{6}{c}{Care Type} \\
\midrule
\vspace{3pt}
\textbf{Direct care} & \textbf{Housekeeping} & \textbf{Mealtimes} & \textbf{Medication rounds } & \textbf{Miscellaneous} & \textbf{Personal care} \\
\midrule
Blood pressure measurement & Equipment cleaning& Dispensing meals& Distributing medication&Call requests&Toiletting\\
& &&&&\\
Weights & Cleaning patient surfaces& &Injections&Bed making &Changing\\
& &&&&\\
SATs~\footnote{Blood sugar saturation} & &&&&\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabularx}}}
\smallskip
\caption{Activity type and examples of each}
\label{tab:activities}\end{table}
\end{document}
\midrule dashed and colored in booktabs -- two kinds of midrules in one booktab
2) Also is there an out-of-the box to get table footnotes in, as I don't know where mine have gone? Footnotes tabularx-environment LaTeX
3) How to avoid the text in each cell being stretched to fill it and hence making odd hyphenations (eg. cleaning pa-tient surfaces) and or (eg. Hygiene prod-ucts)?
Something extra
? If you can't say and you're sure it isn't important, just remove it -- otherwise stick it back in there...)\raggedright
(or\RaggedRight
usingragged2e
if you want to retain hyphenation).\raggedright
in his answer, along with a method of getting the rule you asked for, so i think you should go with that. (the\raggedright
is placed in every "paragraph" cell in the table, but since all of the cells are defined the same way, this is done with code that is automatically replicated 6 times, once for each column. it's nice clean, compact code; recommended.)