Tabularx with calculated column widths that use the whole table width

Question

I am currently searching for a potential tabu replacement (see Tabu command replacement) but wasn't able to find any solution.

So instead of a command replacement I am now searching for something to be at least able to replace the tabus itself. I found some solutions for minor issues as the \extrarowsep and the math-mode-columns. However, I wasn't able to get any acceptable results for the automatic column width generation in combination with a given table width. I checked tabular, tabular*, tabularx and tabulary and didn't get the wanted result. Let me give you an MWE describing my problem:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{tabularx}

\begin{document}
1

\begin{tabular}{|>{$}l<{$}|l|l|l|}
\hline
x\, \in & A & B & C\\\hline
G_{g} & links unten & rechts oben & links unten\\\hline
\end{tabular}\vspace{2cm}

2

\begin{tabularx}{0.7\linewidth}{|>{$}l<{$}|l|l|l|}
\hline
x\, \in & A & B & C\\\hline
G_{g} & links unten & rechts oben & links unten\\\hline
\end{tabularx}\vspace{2cm}

3

\begin{tabularx}{0.7\linewidth}{|>{$}X<{$}|X|X|X|}
\hline
x\, \in & A & B & C\\\hline
G_{g} & links unten & rechts oben & links unten\\\hline
\end{tabularx}\vspace{2cm}

4

\begin{tabularx}{0.7\linewidth}{|>{$}X<{$}|l|l|l|}
\hline
x\, \in & A & B & C\\\hline
G_{g} & links unten & rechts oben & links unten\\\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}

So table number 1 gives the wanted feature of automatically calculated column widths. But as far as I undestood I can not give a desired table width. That is possible with tables 2, 3 and 4. But as you can see there the problems are:

• all l columns (2): they calculate the needed column width but don't use the whole table width
• all X columns (3): they use the table width but are all the same size (as I understood: the table width is equally parted between all X columns)
• one X and the rest l columns (4): slightly better; now the whole table width is used, the l columns have nice calculated widths and the X column uses the rest. Three problems with that:

1. I always have to include different column types
2. this might be okay for the given example but doesn't look nice for a table width of 0.4\linewidth or \linewidth
3. No flexibility over the widths of the X columns without huge (and individual for every tabu) extra definitions.

Long story short: None of these examples give me the same result as

\begin{tabu}to 0.7\linewidth{|X[-1l]|X[-1l]|X[-1l]|X[-1l]|}

would have given me (table width 0.7\linewidth and reasonable but dynamically scale columns, all with the same construction parameter [-1l])

Now am I missing something? I also found some nice extra definitions as \hsize and \columnfill but have no idea how to construct the wanted behaviour.

Answer 1

It’s easy peasy with tblr environment of the new LaTeX3 package tabularray:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabularray}
\begin{document}
\begin{tblr}{width=0.8\linewidth,colspec={|X[2,l]|X[3,l]|X[-1,r]|X[r]|}}
\hline
 One & Two & Three & Four \\
\hline
\end{tblr}
\end{document}