Problem with formatting two tabulars and long caption in table*

Question

I am using 2 tabular inside the same table*, with the same caption. everything works fine if the caption length is small, say a single line. But when I add a really long caption which also contains some equations as well, the layout is lost.

The tabulars loses its centering property and only the latter half of caption is shown. I am not sure how to resolve this.

    \begin{table*}[t]
    \centering

    \caption{long sentense with $some equation$ }\label{params} \\ \\
    \resizebox{0.8\textwidth}{!}{
    \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
    .
    .
    .
    \end{tabular}
    }

    \resizebox{0.8\textwidth}{!}{%
    \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
    .  
    .
    .
    \end{tabular}
    }
    \end{table*}

Answer 1

You were missing three %-signs in your code. Please have a look on my MWE. The resizeboxes were perfectly centred, but their content wasn't. As you can see in my image, they are now. The actual problem was that the linebreaks after those commands are resulting in a normal whitespace. Having that scaled up that much with your resizebox, this little space can get really ugly.

Please note that you should not use those back-slashes after your label. In order to increase the space after your caption, just use the package caption (my recommendation anyway). Your broken caption can not be reproduced from your MWE so let me know, if there is still some problem.

% arara: lualatex % you may use pdflatex if you kick out `lua-visual-debug`
% arara: lualatex % second run for the `\listoftables`

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{mathtools} % for \text{}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{lua-visual-debug} % just for the nice demo
\usepackage{blindtext} % for a longer caption

\begin{document}
    \listoftables
    \begin{table*}[t]       
        \caption[short form]{\blindtext $\text{some equation}$ }\label{params}
        \centering
        \resizebox{0.8\textwidth}{!}{% <- this was missing
            \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
                .
                .
                .
            \end{tabular}% <- this was missing
        }

        \resizebox{0.8\textwidth}{!}{%
            \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|r|}
                .  
                .
                .
            \end{tabular}% <- this was missing
        }
    \end{table*}
\end{document}

Answer 2

The \resizebox is of no use here, it seems to exaggerates the vertical lines widths/dots size and change the adjustment. A fontsize command such as \Large etc. is better, in my point of view.

I tried to 'improve' the tabular usage and suggest to wrap the layout in an outer tabular.

The caption should be used with a [] arg. for the LoF, since it could be too long for the LoF otherwise.

I used the outer tabular with {|c|} in order to show the equal horizontal spacings.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{caption}
\begin{document}

\listoftables

\begin{table*}[t]
    \centering
    \caption[short caption]{long sentence with $some equation$ }\label{params} 
    \begin{tabular}{|c|}
      \huge
      \begin{tabular}{|l*{8}{|r}|}
        & a & b & c & d & e & f& g & h 
      \end{tabular}
     \tabularnewline[2ex]

     \LARGE
      \begin{tabular}{|l*{8}{|r}|}
        & a & b & c & d & e & f& g & h 
      \end{tabular}
    \end{tabular}
  \end{table*}

\end{document}