5

I'm trying to make a table with fixed column widths. Cells in the first column will generally not have enough text to require a line break within the cell. The second column's cells will quite often be multi-line cells. Whenever I have a cell in the first column require a linebreak I get an "underfull \hbox" warning like:

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 7--7

Here is an example of what I am currently doing:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}
  \begin{tabular}{|p{0.25\columnwidth}|p{0.75\columnwidth}|}
    \hline
    longish line of text & second cell that will often have a lot of text\\
    \hline
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}

I don't require that the column widths be fixed to what they are, or fixed at all. I just want to allow newlines in both columns without having the first column get too wide (and cause excessive newlines in the second column). I also need to have this table fit in a twocolumn environment, which is where most of the space restriction comes from.

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1 Answer 1

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6

If \raggedright is acceptable...

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}
 \begin{tabular}{|p{0.25\columnwidth}|p{0.75\columnwidth}|}
    \hline
\raggedright % PS
    longish line of text & second cell that will often have a lot of text\\
    \hline
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}

A second version:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{array}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}
 \begin{tabular}{|>{\raggedright}p{0.25\columnwidth}|p{0.75\columnwidth}|}
    \hline
%\raggedright % PS
    longish line of text & second cell that will often have a lot of text\\
    \hline
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}


\end{document}

And you'd better add Werner's corrections.

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4
  • Thats perfect, I think it even ends up looking better than trying to justify only two words. Is there a better way to get \raggedright for every line than putting it before every row that is a problem?
    – Matt
    May 14, 2013 at 1:41
  • You should also use a column specification of the form |p{\dimexpr0.25\columnwidth-2\tabcolsep-1.5\arrayrulewidth}|p{\dimexpr0.75\columnwidth-2\tabcolsep-1.5\arrayrulewidth}|
    – Werner ♦
    May 14, 2013 at 1:41
  • @Matt You can add \usepackage{array} \begin{document} \begin{table} \begin{tabular}{|>{\raggedright}p{0.25\columnwidth}|p{0.75\columnwidth}|}. Please read also Werner's correction to avoid overfull hboxes.
    – Przemysław Scherwentke
    May 14, 2013 at 2:10
  • 3
    Recall that if \raggedright is used in the last column, the row must be terminated by \tabularnewline (or \arraybackslash from the array package should be used).
    – egreg
    May 14, 2013 at 7:56

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