I am creating a report in LaTeX which involves a few tables. I'm stuck on that as my cell data in the table is exceeding the width of the page. Can I somehow wrap the text so that it falls into the next line in the same cell of the table?
Is it somehow related to the table's width? But as it's overshooting the page's width, will it make a difference?
If you want to wrap your text but maintain alignment then you can wrap that cell in a minipage
or varwidth
environment (varwidth comes from the varwidth package). Varwidth will be "as wide as it's contents but no wider than X". You can create a custom column type which acts like "p{xx}" but shrinks to fit by using
\newcolumntype{M}[1]{>{\begin{varwidth}[t]{#1}}l<{\end{varwidth}}}
which may require the array
package. Then when you use something like \begin{tabular}{llM{2in}}
the first two columns we be normal left-aligned and the third column will be normal left aligned but if it gets wider than 2in then the text will be wrapped.
To change the text AB
into A \r B
in a table cell, put this into the cell position: \makecell{A \\ B}
.
Before doing that, you also need to include package makecell
.
\begin{table}
\caption{ Example of force text wrap}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|}
\hline
cell 1 & cell 2 \\ \hline
cell 3 & cell 4 & & very big line that needs to be wrap. \\ \hline
cell 5 & cell 6 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\label{table:example}
\end{center}
\end{table}
I like the simplicity of tabulary
package:
\usepackage{tabulary}
...
\begin{tabulary}{\linewidth}{LCL}
\hline
Short sentences & \# & Long sentences \\
\hline
This is short. & 173 & This is much loooooooonger, because there are many more words. \\
This is not shorter. & 317 & This is still loooooooonger, because there are many more words. \\
\hline
\end{tabulary}
In the example, you arrange the whole width of the table with respect to \textwidth. E.g 0.4 of it. Then the rest is automatically done by the package.
Most of the example is taken from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables .
Simple like a piece of CAKE!
You can define a new column type like (L
in this case) while maintaining the current alignment (c
, r
or l
):
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\centering\arraybackslash}m{3cm}}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{|c|L|L|}
\hline
Title 1 & Title 2 & Title 3 \\
\hline
one-liner & multi-line and centered & \multicolumn{1}{m{3cm}|}{multi-line piece of text to show case a multi-line and justified cell} \\
\hline
apple & orange & banana \\
\hline
apple & orange & banana \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}
With the regular tabular
environment, you want to use the p{width}
column type, as marcog indicates. But that forces you to give explicit widths.
Another solution is the tabularx
environment:
\usepackage{tabularx}
...
\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{ r X }
right-aligned foo & long long line of blah blah that will wrap when the table fills the column width\\
\end{tabularx}
All X columns get the same width. You can influence this by setting \hsize
in the format declaration:
>{\setlength\hsize{.5\hsize}} X >{\setlength\hsize{1.5\hsize}} X
but then all the factors have to sum up to 1, I suppose (I took this from the LaTeX companion). There is also the package tabulary
which will adjust column widths to balance row heights. For the details, you can get the documentation for each package with texdoc tabulary
(in TeXlive).
Another option is to insert a minipage in each cell where text wrapping is desired, e.g.:
\begin{table}[H]
\begin{tabular}{l}
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\columnwidth}%
a very long line a very long line a very long line a very long line
a very long line a very long line a very long line a very long line
a very long line a very long line a very long line %
\end{minipage}\tabularnewline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Source: Stackoverflow.com