I've been struggling for some time trying to format a moderately complex table of numbers and I'm starting to wonder if embedding multiple tabular blocks was a good idea to start with...
At this point, I was trying to place the row headings for my data: "case 1", "case 2", etc, and it started looking very much like my approach was flawed.
You'll probably get a good idea of what I want just by looking at the compiled result. It's the vertical lines that should coincide (although the detached sub-tables under "First Order" and "Second Order" also look fine this way, after all...)
Here's my horrendous code

Code: Select all
Code, edit and compile here:
\begin{table}[h]\centering\caption{\label{tab_results_alpha+} Method results on the $\alpha_+$ branch}\scriptsize{\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}\hline& $\beta_+$ & $\beta_-$ \\&\begin{tabular}{|c|c|}\hlineFirst Order & Second Order \\\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}\hlinen & nr & t \\\hline1 & 2 & 3 \\\hline4 & 5 & 6\end{tabular}&\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|}\hlinen & nr & nf & t \\\hline1 & 2 & 3 & 4 \\\hline5 & 6 & 7 & 8\end{tabular}\end{tabular}&\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}\hlineFirst Order & Second Order \\\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}\hlinen & nr & t \\\hline1 & 2 & 3 \\\hline4 & 5 & 6