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I have a fixed-column long table, with much text inside, that spans about three pages. I set it using the supertabular package, and for the most part it is working (I will still have to go back to manually tweak a few things once the document is complete). However, I sometimes wonder if longtable would have been a better choice.

Looking for troubleshooting tips for tables in this site, I noticed that there are a little over three times as many questions tagged for longtable than there are for supertabular. I could speculate that this is either because supertabular has fewer undesirable side-effects or because longtable is the preferred package, therefore more people will have problems with it. I have tried them both, and by putting enough time into them I have gotten the desired results; however, the question still nags me: which one is the right one (or the better one) for which type of long-table?

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    If you're happy with columns changing width across pages, then supertabular can be for you. :)
    – egreg
    May 9, 2012 at 15:11
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    Why don't you try longtabu from tabu?
    – user11232
    May 9, 2012 at 15:45
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    as @HarishKumar, I would also suggest you look at longtabu. I am not entirely sure what you mean about it getting "less love than supertabular".
    – ArTourter
    May 9, 2012 at 16:58
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    IIRC longtabu uses longtable internally.
    – cgnieder
    May 9, 2012 at 17:01
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    If you use any of the mentioned packages other than longtable then any bug or problem reports don't go to me. That is a definite advantage of using those packages.
    – David Carlisle
    May 9, 2012 at 18:49

2 Answers 2

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Flippant comment moved to answer as requested:-):

If you use any of the mentioned packages other than longtable then any bug or problem reports don't go to me. That is a definite advantage of using those packages.

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    While you have my heartfelt thanks for all your work on LaTeX including longtable, I have to say that this answer is utterly unhelpful.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    May 18, 2016 at 16:34
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    In contrast this is a useful answer.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    May 18, 2016 at 16:39
  • @Gilles as it says it was a comment but the OP requested it be posted as an answer. It doesn't do you any harm, but I can probably survive with two less rep:-)
    – David Carlisle
    May 18, 2016 at 17:47
  • @Gilles, this question predates the question you link to by about 1-1/2 years. At the time (and still now), it was helpful enough for me to request the comment to be made an answer and accept it. Unlike the question you link, that asks about the technical differences between two table packages, this one asks about use cases. Knowing that @DavidCarlisle is the maintainer of longtable and incredibly active in the community informed my decision to accept the answer. If you insist on marking it as a duplicate, refer to this question instead: tex.stackexchange.com/q/12672/3731
    – Ricardo
    May 18, 2016 at 19:25
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which one is the right one (or the better one) for which type of long-table?

Unfortunately, longtable issues a "longtable not in 1-column mode" error message when used in multi-column documents, while supertabular does produce multiple-column and/or multiple-page tables in such documents.

As a side note, on the other hand, supertabular breaks columns earlier than it should (thus leaving partially blank column bottoms). I've also tried xtab, which presents itself as "[...] an extension of the supertabular package and also reduces or eliminates some of its weaknesses." in its documentation, but the problem got worse, since xtab broke columns even earlier than where supertabular did.

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    I absolutely love longtable (thanks, David Carlisle!), but the "doesn't play nice with twocolumn/onecolumn settings made it unusable for me in one part of a very large document, and xtab, even with its own warts, came to the rescue. So the overall answer to OP's question might be "use both, each when it provides the thing you need." But the two/one column gotcha noted in this answer came as a big surprise to me, so I applaud its being mentioned here. [It's probably in the longtable documentation, but...that's a lot of reading to do and remember 5 years later.]
    – John
    Jul 6, 2020 at 12:57

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