My preferred way of structuring and formatting large lists of content is with longtable. Some of my cells contain a lot of text, both in paragraph and itemize or enumerate environments. For reasons explained to me very clearly by David Carlisle page breaks are only possible when rows end/begin, so I end up with enormous portions of blank space. I haven't yet forced a situation to see how my compile would fail if the box itself couldn't be contained on 1 full page. Since my content is not unbreakable like an image, I'd like to know what other latex environments I could be using that would let me preserve formatting (vertical and horizontal lines, column widths etc.) but break across multiple pages? Is there a text only environment that I could be using (text only might mean that breaks are expected - no pictures)?
I have seen years worth of repeated questions asking how to do this, but I haven't found a workable answer in any of them. So I am hopeful that a solution has evolved at some point, it's just been hard to find.
I can't provide a MWE for every other environments that don't seem to work (a sampling of those I remember trying to use is listed below) and I haven't provided a MWE for longtable since I know it can't be modified to permit a page break mid-row.
- minipage
- parbox
- colorbox
- tabular
- mdframed
- and many others
longtable was selected for me because:
- it could be combined with
threeparttable - it could span multiple pages
- cells could contain long content blocks
- supported
multicolumnandmultirow - column formatting commands were easily customized
- excellent support from knowledgeable users
- good documentation
