Change font size in tables document-wide

Question

Using scrartcl as my document class, tables are set in a slightly larger font size than my normal text (12pt vs. 11pt I suppose). How can I change the font size for tables document wide? At the moment I just add a \small to all my tables.

Answer 1

\makeatletter
\renewenvironment{table}{%
  \if@tablecaptionabove\let\caption\captionabove
  \else\let\caption\captionbelow\fi
  \small\@float{table}%
}{%
  \end@float
}
\makeatother

Answer 2

You can use the environment hook provided by etoolbox. The following code will change the table contents to \tiny (well \tiny may be better for the demonstration purpose though no one will really use it).

The hook is plugged at tabular. Use \AtBeginEnvironment{table}{\tiny} has no effect. And indeed if it has effect, you won't really want it, since it will chang the caption too. You may want to customize the caption by another package like caption or ccaption`, rather than change it here.

Since you won't really use a dozen kinds of tabular environment, so call \AtBeginEnvironment for those you use will be enough (for the sake of good typographic practice you should not use more than two type of tables, one for short, one for long).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}

\AtBeginEnvironment{tabular}{\tiny}

\begin{document}
  Some text in normal text.
  \begin{table}[ht]
    \caption{A table}
    \begin{tabular}{c}
      Some text in  table size
    \end{tabular}
  \end{table}
\end{document}

Answer 3

The solution by Marco, redefining the table environment and inserting \small is a good approach. However, it doesn't work yet. Of course it could not be tested, since no example has been given.

The macro \@floatboxreset calls \normalsize. This can be redefined using \small instead or just omitting \normalsize. To not affect other floats, also this can be done within the table redefinition. I called \normalsize at the end of the environment.

So, here's a compilable example which works as desired:

\documentclass[10pt]{scrartcl}
\makeatletter
\renewenvironment{table}{%
  \if@tablecaptionabove\let\caption\captionabove
  \else\let\caption\captionbelow\fi
  \renewcommand* {\@floatboxreset}{%
    \reset@font\@setminipage}
  \small\@float{table}%
}{%
  \end@float\normalsize
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
Text in 10pt

\begin{table}[!htbp]
\begin{tabular}{l}
Text in 9pt
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

Text in 10pt
\end{document}

I returned to this question because I dealt with a very similar topic on LaTeX-Community.org today.

Answer 4

One more easy way to do what you need is to write

\let\oldtabular\tabular
\renewcommand{\tabular}{\footnotesize\oldtabular}

If you use another table environment than tabular (for instance, tabularx), you should replace \tabular by \tabularx in the command:

\let\oldtabularx\tabularx
\renewcommand{\tabularx}{\footnotesize\oldtabularx}

This will not affect table captions. This answer will work for any document class and any definition of the tabular environment.

Answer 5

The approached mentioned here are quite useful. Here is another short way to do that, just redefine the table environment as below:

 \makeatletter
 \renewenvironment{table}
     {\@float{table} \small}
     {\end@float}
 \makeatother