Top-Alignment in Multirow + Multicolumn

Question

I have a tabular, in which the first cell is a 2-column 2-row cell. In this cell, there is some \huge text which I want to be top-aligned in the space that this 2-column-2-row-cell now spans. Here is a simple example:

\begin{tabular}{c|p{3cm}|c|l}
    \hline
    \multicolumn{2}{l}{\multirow[t]{2}{*}{{\huge Large Text}}} & X & Foo \\
    \hline
    \multicolumn{2}{l}{}  & Y & Bar \\[1ex]
    \hline
    X & Baz  &  Z & Fuzz 
\end{tabular}

This produces this result:

Note that I inserted all the horizontal and vertical lines just to show where the column / row borders are. The multirow documentation claims that the [t] I specified should cause top-alignment, but obviously something is broken. I would like "Large Text" to be top-aligned with "X Foo".

Note also that I need "X"/"Y"/"Z" and "Foo"/"Bar"/"Fuzz" to be aligned, so I can't just makecell everything right of "Large Text" into a single cell.

There are a million questions related to the combination of multirow and multicolumn here, but I could not find one that experienced the same too-high-alignment problem as I. If I missed some I'm sorry, please point me in the right direction!

Answer 1

The [t] option aligns the baselines, but there's a possible trick: \multirow accepts a number of rows with a decimal part (to be determined by trial and error), so if I've well understood, this code does what you want:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array, multirow}
\begin{document}

\begin{table}

\begin{tabular}{c|p{3cm}|c|l}
    \hline
    \multicolumn{2}{l}{\multirow{1.8}{*}{{\huge Large Text}}} & X & Foo \\
    \cline{3-4}
    \multicolumn{2}{l}{} & Y & Bar \\[1ex]
    \hline
    X & Baz & Z & Fuzz
\end{tabular}
    \end{table}

\end{document}