Make a table span multiple pages

Question

I have a table that takes up a full page, but I want it to start on a page that already has some text and then continue onto the next page (i.e. it's ok if the table gets broken up and spans two pages). It is a simple two column table:

\begin{table}[h]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} 
\hline
foo & bar \\ \hline 
foo & bar \\ \hline 
...
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

I guess I need longtable? How do I use it?

Answer 1

There are a few options described in How can I make a table that takes up more than a single page?

I've put a MWE below using the longtable package; I deliberately didn't put the longtable in the table environment so that it wouldn't float, and would show that it breaks across pages.

As described in @Werner's comment, the documentation has a lot of detail.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{lipsum} % just for dummy text- not needed for a longtable

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[1]
\lipsum[1]

%\begin{table}[h] 
%\centering
\begin{longtable}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} 
\hline
foo & bar \\ \hline 
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
foo & bar \\ \hline
\caption{Your caption here} % needs to go inside longtable environment
\label{tab:myfirstlongtable}
\end{longtable}
%\end{table} 

Table \ref{tab:myfirstlongtable} shows my first longtable.
\end{document}

As a side note, some folks would advocate against using vertical lines in a table- that's a separate discussion though :) Have a look at Why not use vertical lines ('|') in a tabular?

Answer 2

You may try longtblr environment of tabularray package. It has X column and can be used in two column documents.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[a6paper,margin=15mm]{geometry}

\usepackage{tabularray}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\begin{document}

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

\begin{longtblr}[
  caption = {Long Title},
  label = {tab:test},
]{
  colspec = {|XX[4]|},
  rowhead = 1,
  hlines,
  row{even} = {gray9},
  row{1} = {olive9},
} 
Head & Head \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
foo  & bar \\
\end{longtblr}

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

\end{document}