My last answer about vertically aligned table inspired me to write my first question at this site. How to create the following table in various TeX approaches: plainTeX, LaTeX, Context, eplain, OPmac etc.? The comparison would be welcome.
The table has given column widths, each data item is vertically centered, some data items can be vertically spanned and vertically centered in its space. Data items are one of the two types: single centered line in the column or the paragraph. There are single lines between columns and between lines. The table looks like:
It would be fine to separate the code to two parts: first part will be signed as
% macro code
created by the macro programmer and/or typo designer.
The second part is signed as % document
and the author of the text is
supposed to write it.
I'll give the answer for plainTeX (this is my domain). I am looking forward to another approaches.
As a bonus you can try to create the table from my book TeXbook inside out (full text is available here) from the page 142. The vertical aligning is here too: the last but one line is vertically centered and the the last line is aligned to the top.
Edit I am still waiting for LaTeX solution. One user mentioned in comments that this is worse aspect from typographical point of view. But I am not evaluating the typographical quality of many examples presented at tex.stackexchange. Why do it with this special case? For example, my customer asked me for creating the following excel-like table:
This is not used for printing in book but only as a tool printed on paper sheets to do data more transparent. This is typical example for \valign
usage.
Is there a LaTeX approach to do this? LaTeX is mentioned here in 98 % of threads. Can we found somebody to explain this from LaTeX point of view? Or LaTeX isn't able to do it (without absorbing the plain TeX solution)?
Note: the vertical-alignment tag includes 1030 threads. What can be more natural than \valign
primitive for such request...
Today, there is very similar question Different vertical alignment with multirow.
;-)
\multirow
? I don't know. You can simply say: LaTeX is not able to do it. Please do detach the typographical aspect of this, this was not mine proposal. I did use\valign
in many more cases in my practice and I am interesting how this is solved in another TeX macro packages.\halign/\valign
-primitives, you can only do either\multispan
for columns in\halign
, or for rows in\valign
, but not both in the same table.