The maker of Bonnets ferociously planned
A novel arrangement of bows:
While the Billiard-marker with quivering hand
Was chalking the tip of his nose.
Tables

For some reason, the wonderful efficiency of LaTeX falls to pieces when confronted with any unusual table requirements. Some accumulated wisdom:

  • If you want your columns to have a fixed width, then use the column specifier p{1cm}, for example. If you want the cell contents to be vertically aligned in the middle inside that cell use m{1cm} instead:

    \begin{tabular}{|p{1cm}|m{1cm}|}

  • If you want LaTeX to judge how wide the columns should be automatically, use the tabularx environment instead, and then X for the column specifier:

    \begin{tabularx}{1.2\textwidth}{|X|X|}

    The \textwidth parameter tells LaTeX how wide the table should be relative to the normal width of a page. If you don't like the default type of X column then you can change it:

    \renewcommand{\tabularxcolumn}[1]{>{\arraybackslash}m{#1}}

    This example would have the contents of cells vertically aligned in the middle.
  • If you want to apply some formatting to every cell in a column, specify this inside >{} in the column specification:

    \begin{tabular}{|>{\centering}p{1cm}|m{1cm}|}

    This will horizontally center the contents of the first column.
  • To fiddle around with the width between rows, try playing with

    \renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1}

    in the document preamble.
  • If you are struggling with gaps between columns in any way, usually it is @{} which comes to your rescue. This inputs some block and overrides a lot of the usual spacing; in particular, if you leave the brackets empty then you get a lot less space than the default. Put this in the column specifier.

    \begin{tabularx}{1.2\textwidth}{|@{}X@{\hspace{1cm}}|X|}

  • LaTeX also struggles with linebreaks inside the same cell. The easiest way seems to be to define a subtable inside that cell and then use that to do your linebreaking.

    \begin{tabularx}{1.2\textwidth}{|@{}X@{\hspace{1cm}}|X|}
    Example & \begin{tabular}[x]{@{}c@{}}\\Lunch\\Now?\end{tabular}\\
    \end{tabularx}

  • The tabularx environment does struggle with central horizontal alignment in its last cell, for some reason. The fix I found was to define a 'ghost' column on the end with no width.

    \begin{tabularx}{1.4\textwidth}{|@{}>{\centering}X@{}|@{}>{\centering}X@{}|@{}p{-5cm}@{}}

  • If your text isn't wrapping in the cells, use a different column specifier. Try using p{} or X instead of c.
  • The makecell package has lots of useful little commands; see its documentation for details.
  • It streamlines complicated tables considerably if you define a new column type in the preamble:

    \newcolumntype{R}{@{\hspace{1em}}>{\centering}X@{}}
Miscellaneous

  • The geometry package is very useful, especially now that you can change the margins mid-document with \newgeometry and then \restoregeometry back to the default.

    \newgeometry{bottom=0.6cm, left=2cm, right=0.5cm, top=0.5cm}
    ...
    \restoregeometry

    Make sure you're using the newest version of the geometry package for this, from here. Also, if you're getting strange results, try changing the sequence of commands; for example, try

    \newpage
    \newgeometry{bottom=0.6cm, left=2cm, right=0.5cm, top=0.5cm}

    instead of

    \newgeometry{bottom=0.6cm, left=2cm, right=0.5cm, top=0.5cm}
    \newpage

  • Getting images and such where you want them can be tricky; don't forget that you can use \hspace and \vspace to create blocks of white space around it to push it where it should be.