Force table width to text column width

Question

seems like an easy problem, but I'm really a newbie to LaTeX and cannot come up with solution even with some QAs on this forum I found. Can you please help? As the picture shows, the table is wider than the text column and collides with the other column. I understand the text in the table is too long, but is there a simple way to force the table to be same width as the text and wrap the text into two lines in the same table row without using different packages?

\usepackage[table]{hypcap}
\begin{table}[ht]
    \centering
    \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.8}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|l}
        Parameter & Value & Units & Description\\
\toprule \midrule
        E & 200 & GPa & Young's modulus\\
        $f_{c}$ & 30 & MPa & Ultimate compressive strength\\
        $\varepsilon_{t0}$ & 805 $\cdot 10^{-4}$ & - & Initial threshold of damage for $\varepsilon_t$\\ 
\hline
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{a}
\end{table}

Answer 1

Without a different package, I don't know how to do this automatically (but I have added the missing package booktabs from your code in order to use the \toprule and \midrule from your code).

You could use the p{<length>} column specification to give to your last column a width. You need to find the value for the length with trials and errors (in this code, I have expand the size from 2cm until I obtain a overfull hbox warning; in this particular example, I got a warning with the value 2.5cm, but not with the value 2.49cm).

I have removed the hypcap package, not relevant here, and added lipsum for filling the page with text.

In this code, I have also added explicitly the letterpaper paper format in the document class, because the value to use for the type p column depend on the width of the page, and by default for some Europeans users, it's the a4paper format when no paper format is explicitly given.

\documentclass[10pt,twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-7]

\begin{table}[ht]
    \centering
    \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.8}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|p{2.49cm}}
        Parameter & Value & Units & Description\\
\toprule \midrule
        E & 200 & GPa & Young's modulus\\
        $f_{c}$ & 30 & MPa & Ultimate compressive strength\\
        $\varepsilon_{t0}$ & 805 $\cdot 10^{-4}$ & - & Initial threshold of damage for $\varepsilon_t$\\ 
\hline
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{a}
\end{table}

\lipsum[8-14]
\end{document}

With the original {c|c|c|l} tabular specification:

With the {c|c|c|p{2.49cm}} tabular specification:

Answer 2

• Welcome to TeX:SE!
• Please, next time instead code fragment provide MWE (Minimal Working Example). Now we had to guessing about document class and (by it) defined page layout. Both influence on table formatting
• For your table I would emplox tabularray package with libraries/packages booktabs, siunitx and ragged2e:

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\usepackage{ragged2e}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{tabularray}
\UseTblrLibrary{booktabs, siunitx}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]

    \begin{table}[ht]
\begin{tblr}{
             colsep=3pt,
             colspec={@{} c Q[c,si={table-format=3.0}] Q[c,si] X[j, appto=\RaggedRight] @{}},
             cell{3-Z}{1} = {mode=math},
             cell{1,Z}{2,3}  = {guard}
             }
    \toprule
Parameter   & Value & Units & Description\\
    \midrule
E           & 200   & \unit{\giga\pascal} 
                            & Young's modulus\\
f_{c}       & 30    & \unit{\mega\pascal} 
                            & Ultimate compressive strength\\
\varepsilon_{t_0}
            & \num{805E-4}
                    & --    & Initial threshold of damage for $\varepsilon_t$   \\
    \bottomrule
\end{tblr}
\caption{a}
\label{tab:?}
    \end{table}
\lipsum[2-6]
\end{document}