# Use \ldelim with tall rows

I would like to put a brace in front of some table rows. I found a similar question here and in an answer the use of the bigdelim package is suggested.

The problem is, it does not seem to work if a row contains a lot of text that is wrapped to multiple lines. Here is an example to illustrate the problem:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{multirow,bigdelim}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{ccl}
\ldelim\{{3}{3mm}[a] & \ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[x] &
\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}\\
&\ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[y] & More text\\
&\ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[z] & More text
\end{tabular}
\end{document}


This produces the following:

What I would like is to let the brace x span over all of the lorem ipsum text and the brace a to span over all three table rows.

How can I achieve this (using \ldelim is not a strict requirement, but I like the syntax)?

EDIT: Note that the minipage I use to hold the text does not only need to contain text but also e.g. a tikzpicture or some small tabular (I'm not exactly sure yet…). So the minipages height does not need to be a multiple of the height of a line of text.

• \ldelim has an option that tells how many lines it should span, and right now it is set to use 3 lines. Change it to 13 and add [t] option to the minipage and it should work. (\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}). But I don't think a minipage solution is the right thing for you. Can you include your own case here? Jun 1, 2013 at 7:52
• @percusse Thanks! The documentation describes the option as "…extends over the n rows…", so I didn't think about setting it to a higher number than I have rows in the table. See my edit to the question for why your solution does not work and why I would like to use the minipage. Any other ideas? Jun 1, 2013 at 8:15
• You can look at Gonzalo's solution from the same question too. Jun 1, 2013 at 8:17
• @percusse Thanks again! If possible I'd like to avoid specifying the braces height, it should always be "as tall as needed". But I think I'll give Herberts answer a try (even if the syntax is a bit awkward, in my opinion), if no other solution pops up… Jun 1, 2013 at 8:30

You can get most of this effect by using the \left and \right commands from mathmode. It's not a great solution though, as the horizontal alignment is not great. Then again, you might be able to just tweak it manually.
\documentclass{article}
$a \left\{\begin{array}{l} x \left\{\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth} \blindtext \end{minipage}\right. \\ y\left\{\mbox{More text}\right. \\ z\left\{\mbox{More text}\right. \end{array}\right.$