[OS X TeX] table help

[Maarten Sneep]

On 20 May 2005, at 16:30, Jason Davies wrote:

> jut trying to get the hang of a basic table, have spent an hour with
> Mittelbach and Goossens to no avail. If someone has a fairly simple
> table example with borders drawn in (no maths required) that I can
> study, I'd be most grateful...
>
> it's just a couple of tables with text, two columns and several rows
> that I need to produce but I'm not savvy enough to make sense of the
> manuals and even copying out examples seems to throw up errors...:-)

Here's a commented sample.

\begin{table} %% this is actually a floating environment, similar to  
\begin{figure}
\caption[short title]{The full title} %% The full title. The short  
one will appear in a list of tables
%% the real table starts here
\begin{tabular}% start the table
{ll}% indicate that there are two left aligned columns*
first row, first column & first row, second column \\
second row, first column & by now you should get the idea
\end{tabular}

%% end sample.

* this can be the tricky bit. Vertical lines can be indicated here  
with | between the columns. l, r and c are for left, right and  
centred columns. Other options exist, but beyond my intended scope of  
this mail. I think the not so short intro has a nice introduction.  
Lamport has the best intro, and is very easy to follow along.

I'm not a great supporter of lines in tables, but you can experiment  
with \hline command at the end or the beginning of a row.

HTMH,

Maarten
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