How to specify a fixed height for all rows in a table?

Question

I have something like this:

\newcolumntype{C}[1]{>{\centering\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}

\begin{tabular}{| c | C{3cm} | C{4cm} |}
Short Text & Short Text & Short Text \\ \hline
Short Text & Short Text & Loooooooooooooooooooooong Text \\ \hline 
\end{tabular}

which would make the second row have a wider height. Then how do I specify a fixed height for all rows in my table?

Answer 1

If you want to have the same height in each row, try one of these two methods:

1. Using a \vbox for every cell:

   \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
   \usepackage{array}  
   
   \begin{document} 
   
   \newcolumntype{C}[1]{%
    >{\vbox to 5ex\bgroup\vfill\centering}%
    p{#1}%
    <{\egroup}}  
   
   \begin{tabular}{|c | C{3cm} | C{5cm} |} 
    \hline 
    Short Text & Short Text & Short Text \tabularnewline \hline
   Short Text  & Short Text & Loooooooooo  oooooooooooong Text \tabularnewline \hline  
   Short Text  & Short Text & Loooooooooooooooooooooong Text \tabularnewline \hline 
   \end{tabular}    
   \end{document}
   

   

   Interesting links about tables: TableTricks.pdf, and Tables on Wikibooks

2. A new approach that is perhaps more easy to modify is:

   \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
   \usepackage{array}  
   
   \begin{document} 
   \def\mystrut(#1,#2){\vrule height #1 depth #2 width 0pt}
   
   \newcolumntype{C}[1]{%
      >{\mystrut(3ex,2ex)\centering}%
      p{#1}%
      <{}}  
   
   \begin{tabular}{|c | C{3cm} | C{4cm} |} 
   \hline 
   Short Text & Short Text & Short Text \tabularnewline \hline
   Short Text  & Short Text & Loooooooooooooooooong Text \tabularnewline \hline  
   \end{tabular}    
   \end{document}
   

   In this solution, it's easier to place the text. You only need to modify height and depth for the strut.

Answer 2

This is one of the places where I find ConTeXt's key value interface much more intuitive

\setupTABLE[c][2][width=3cm]
\setupTABLE[c][3][width=5cm]

\setupTABLE[each][each][height=3\lineheight,align={middle,middle},frame=on]

\starttext

\startTABLE
  \NC Short text \NC Short text \NC Short Text \NC \NR
  \NC Short text \NC Short text \NC Loooooooooo oooooooong teeeeeeeeeeeeeext \NC \NR
  \NC Short text \NC Short text \NC Loooooooooo oooooooong teeeeeeeeeeeeeext \NC \NR
\stopTABLE

\stoptext

I wish there were a LaTeX package that implemented such an interface for tables.

Answer 3

I would rather do it slightly different using a \vphantom, it requires a little more manual work, but is easier to understand.

The reason why you get different size columns is the column specifier m and what it does. This particular specifier is actually a parbox. Obviously, since your text is longer than the width of the parbox it will overflow or get wrapped to the following line. As TeX's hyphenation patterns do not have a pattern for ooooooooooooo it just overflows out of the table, but this is another story.

In order to have all the cells the same hight, I would use a strut or TeX's equivalent a \vphantom in this case. A phantom command will create an invisible box with width zero but the height of the enclosing text. We do this with the command:

\def\Z{\vphantom{\parbox[c]{1cm}{\Huge Something Long}}}

This strut like in manual typesetting will make all the rows equal. The final code is as follows:

\documentclass[11pt]{article} 
\usepackage{array}
\begin{document}
\newcolumntype{C}[1]{>{\centering\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}
\def\Z{\vphantom{\parbox[c]{1cm}{\Huge Something Long}}}
\bigskip
\begin{tabular}{| c | C{3cm} | C{4cm} |}
\hline
\Z Short Text & Short Text & Short Text \\ \hline
\Z Short Text & Short Text & Loooooooooooooooothetheme Text \\ \hline 
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

If you have long repetitive tables of the same type, it might make it worthline to define a command addRow that can automate the addition of the strut.

By changing the parameter in the vphantom parbox to any of t,b,c, you can also get alignments at bottom, center or top.

As a sideline I changed Looo... to a word having an ending with a known hyphenation pattern and this time the overflow of text in the right margin also disappeared.