I use tabu package to generate a table. The tabu package provides superb features such as fixing table column width, but I happen to have some ugly table in a narrow page column.
\documentclass[10pt, twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}[hbtp]
\caption{Strategies and tradeoff factors}\label{tab:factors}
\begin{tabu} to \linewidth{X[c] | X[c]X[c]X[c]X[c]X[c]}
\toprule
{\bf Strategy} & {\bf Size} & {\bf Energy} & {\bf Expressiveness} & {\bf Flexibility} & {\bf Data Quality} \\
\hline
HCHQ & $-$ & $-$ & + & + & + \\
LCLF & + & + & $-$ & $-$ & + \\
Tunable & + & + & + & + & $-$\\
Tunable with hints & + & + & + & + & + \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabu}
\end{table}
\end{document}
I tried this second version:
\begin{table}[hbtp]
\caption{Strategies and tradeoff factors (E1 = Energy, E2 = Expressiveness, F = Flexibility, D = Data Quality)}\label{tab:factors}
\begin{tabu} to \linewidth{c | X[c]X[c]X[c]X[c]X[c]}
\toprule
{\bf Strategy} & {\bf Size} & {\bf E1} & {\bf E2} & {\bf F} & {\bf D} \\
\hline
HCHQ & $-$ & $-$ & + & + & + \\
LCLF & + & + & $-$ & $-$ & + \\
Tunable & + & + & + & + & $-$\\
Tunable with hints & + & + & + & + & + \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabu}
\end{table}
However, I think the label is too long and also ugly.
Is there a better way to make the tabu table look better (making the first column a little bit longer, automatic hyphenation, centering in multiple rows from the hyphenation, and such)?
\bf
and friends have been deprecated for 20+ years for use in LaTeX. Use\bfseries
or\textbf{}
instead. On-topic: don't usetabu
in any document which matters unless you are sure you won't need to compile it (or a modified version of it) in the future. If it is just a one-off throw-away document and you really want to,tabu
should be OK if the bugs don't bite you. But avoid it for anything long term, certainly. Documents which rely on it will break and the package is buggy in the meantime.