longtable: is there an easy way to format a standard multi-page table

Question

This is rather a question of understanding than a problem:

In a thesis, when a table spans over multiple pages, the standard behaviour should, in my opinion be:

• same header/footer, except for the caption, which is appended with "(continued)"
• One entry in the List of tables

In my case, I did it manually with \endfirsthead and \endhead (twice the same "head" except for the word (continued) ) then I had to remove one entry in the list of tables.

This worked but is a lot of work and creates code duplicates, is there a very simple way (e.g. an option) that creates the same result?

Answer 1

For a three column table you can define

\newcommand\ltheadthree[4]{%
\caption{#1}\\
\textbf{#2}&\textbf{#3}&\textbf{#4}
\endfirsthead
\caption[]{#1 (continued)}\\
\textbf{#2}&\textbf{#3}&\textbf{#4}
\endhead}

then

\begin{longtable}{lcr}
\ltheadthree
{the caption}
{head 1}
{head 2}
{head 3}
...

should do more or less what you ask.

Obviously similar commands could be defined for different numbers of columns. Or you could add centering or anything else you wanted for table head formatting.