Display wide and long table

Question

In the appendix of my report, I would like to add a table. The problem is that I have a cell "description" that contains too much text to be displayed on one line, now the row "overflows" on the right. Also there is too many row to be contained on one single page. Is it possible to display my data such as

• Fixed width
• multi-line cell for the description
• Displayed on several pages

Thank you

Answer 1

You may take a look at the tabu package. This extends the well known tabularx and longtable so that you can easily handle them both without writing to a aux file.

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{longtable}

% showcase only strip that
% see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/50296/problem-with-using-loop-inside-the-tabular-environment
\newcounter{my}
\setcounter{my}{0}

\def\myinsert{}%
\loop\ifnum\themy<100
  \addtocounter{my}{1}
  \expandafter\def\expandafter\myinsert\expandafter{%
    \myinsert
    Quite a big cell content  & Not so big content but bigger cell \\
  }%
\repeat
% end showcase 

\begin{document}

\begin{longtabu} to .5\textwidth{X[1]X[2]} % half the width of the text
\myinsert
\end{longtabu}

\end{document}

Any additional information can also be found in the tabu documentation (texdoc tabu)