Whenever I need to create a cell with multiple rows in a tabular environment, I usually create enclose the contents of the cell within a tabular environment within the cell. This has been a great fix for me since it is easy to implement and also since it takes care of vertical alignment across rows.
Unfortunately, it looks like this fix also adds additional padding to the column. I have included an example below to illustrate the issue. Here, the bottom table has a row with "2 row" cells.
In my opinion, both the top table and the bottom table should have equal column widths (determined by the length of "TITLE"), but this is not the case. I suspect the reason why is because the tabular environment adds padding to the column widths.
\documentclass[letter]{article}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\begin{document}
%normal table
\begin{table}[ht]
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\toprule
TITLE & TITLE \\
\midrule
10 & 10 \\
10 & 10 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
%when I use the tabular trick
\begin{table}[ht]
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\toprule
\begin{tabular}{c}TITLE\\A\end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c}TITLE\\B\end{tabular} \\
\midrule
10 & 10 \\
10 & 10 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}
\tabcolsep
lengths to the width of your table, since each column is surrounded by a pair of space (being\tabcolsep
wide). Before manipulating the lengths now, just try@{}c@{}
for each of the subtables you put into the outer table – user31729 Aug 11 '14 at 21:06