# Align arrows in a column of different cells of a table

How can I align the \rightarrow symbols in the cells below?

\begin{table*}[t]
\begin{tabular}{L{3cm}C{2.6cm}C{2.6cm}C{2.6cm}}
\toprule
Norwegian $\rightarrow$ Swedish & ? & ? & ?  \\
Swedish $\rightarrow$ Norwegian & ? & ? & ? \\
...

• Welcome to TeX.SE! Couldn't you just add extra columns for that? You will almost certainly get a nice answer if you provide an MWE. – user121799 May 18 '18 at 3:56

with simple basic tabular environment with l and c columns' specifiers:

edite: reduce space around \rightarrow and added example withr column specifier for the first column

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}[htb]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l@{\,}c@{\,}l} % <---
\toprule
Amazon     & $\rightarrow$ & Twitter   \\
Twitter    & $\rightarrow$ & Amazon    \\
Norwegian  & $\rightarrow$ & Swedish   \\
Swedish    & $\rightarrow$ & Norwegian \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

\medskip
\begin{tabular}{r@{\,}c@{\,}l} % <---
\toprule
Amazon     & $\rightarrow$ & Twitter   \\
Twitter    & $\rightarrow$ & Amazon    \\
Norwegian  & $\rightarrow$ & Swedish   \\
Swedish    & $\rightarrow$ & Norwegian \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}


• @Sebastiano, good morning! thank you very much! – Zarko May 18 '18 at 6:27
• Nice solution. However, how do you solve the issue I'm also having with the arrows having too much white space around them? – pir May 18 '18 at 6:29
• @pir You could use {tabular}{rcl} and then have a look at this answer – gvgramazio May 18 '18 at 8:36
• @pir, see edited answer. – Zarko May 18 '18 at 8:41

I've been facing the same issue. Here's a solution using extra columns as also suggested by @marmot in a comment. However, I'm not completely satisfied with this solution as there's quite a bit of space between the text and arrows. If anyone can find a way to flexibly adjust the amount of space between the text and the arrows, then that would be awesome. I can't just reduce the column size as the text then becomes multi-line.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\newcolumntype{C}[1]{>{\centering\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}
\newcolumntype{L}[1]{>{\let\newline\\\arraybackslash\hspace{0pt}}m{#1}}
\usepackage{multicol}

\begin{document}

\begin{table*}[t]
\centering
\small
\label{tab:da_balanced}
\begin{tabular}{L{1.5cm}L{0.5cm}L{1.5cm}}
\toprule
Amazon & $\rightarrow$ & Twitter \\
Twitter & $\rightarrow$ & Amazon \\
Norwegian & $\rightarrow$ & Swedish \\
Swedish & $\rightarrow$ & Norwegian \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}

\end{document}


One could also use the \rightarrow command in the column definition of the table to avoid repeating this command in every line:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}

\begin{document}
\begin{table}[htb]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l@{\,$\rightarrow$\,}l}
\toprule
Norwegian  & Swedish   \\
Swedish    & Norwegian \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}