[texhax] Tabular, cline and column spacing

[Ignacy Gawedzki]

Hi texhaxers,

I stumbled across a pretty annoying problem with the preamble of tabular.

Suppose I want to typeset a table with three columns, vertical lines but a
horizontal line covering only the second column.  This is easy:

  \begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
    \cline{2-2}
    a & b & c
  \end{tabular}

But now suppose I want to have more space around the vertical line between
columns 2 and 3.  Obviously, that's what @{...} are for:

  \begin{tabular}{|c|c@{\qquad}|@{\qquad}c|}
    \cline{2-2}
    a & b & c
  \end{tabular}

but something's wrong with the horizontal line here.  It is as though whatever
you put in an @{...} suppresses intercolumn space and goes at the end of the
preceding column.

In this very example, if you replace the second @{\qquad} by a >{\qquad}, it
seems to work, but as soon as the column type is p{}, m{} or b{} (or X in
a tabularx) it doesn't.

Does anybody have a solution to that?

Since I'm certainly not the first person with this problem, I prefer to ask on
this list before diving into the frightening world of LaTeX's internals. =)

-- 
I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.