# Make bigdelim work with non-paragraph columns

In one of my tables I'd like a brace to extend over multiple rows. Elsewhere on TeX.SE the bigdelim package is recommended for this purpose. However, it doesn't seem to work for tabular columns not using the p format specifier. For example, the first of the following tables looks correct, with the brace extending across three rows, whereas the brace in the second table is the same height as the "foo" text:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multirow,bigdelim}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{p{2em}l}
\ldelim\{{3}{*}[foo] & bar \\
& baz \\
& quux \\
\end{tabular}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\ldelim\{{3}{*}[foo] & bar \\
& baz \\
& quux \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}


Am I doing something wrong or is this an undocumented limitation of the bigdelim package?

It works if you specify a width for \ldelim. You do not have this restriction if you use blkarray, which provides the same functionality:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{multirow,bigdelim}
\usepackage{blkarray}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{p{2em}l}
\ldelim\{{3}{*}[foo] & bar \\
& baz \\
& quux \\
\end{tabular}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\ldelim\{{3}{2em}[foo] & bar \\
& baz \\
& quux \\
\end{tabular}

\begin{blockarray}{\Left{foo}{\{\,}l}
bar \\
baz \\
quux \\
Lalala…\\
\end{blockarray}
\hskip2cm\begin{blockarray}{l}
\begin{block}{\Left{foo}{\{\,}l}
bar \\
baz \\
quux \\
\end{block}
Lalala…\\
\end{blockarray}
\end{document}