General ⇒ Need some special tabbing

[cap_gemo]

Hello everyone,

I need some help with LaTeX paragraph formatting. I want to have something like a description list, looking like this

equation this corresponds to bla-bla-bla,
because bla-bla-bla
equation this corresponds to bla-bla-bla
because bla-bla-bla
equation this corresponds to bla-bla-bla
because bla-bla-bla

I can't do it with the tabbing environment, since the sentences on the right side extend themselves to several lines (which is not possible in the tabbing environment, unless you break the line yourself, however then the text will be flushed right and not justified, which is not what I exactly want). I also don't like the description environment, since it has a very special tabulation. What I want, is really something like I've written up there: all lines of the descriptive text start at the same position. For example, in any Office utility (OpenOffice Writer or KWord) I'd easily do it, setting the left indent, say, to 4 cm, the first line indent to -4 cm and a put a left tab stop at 4 cm. How could I do something like this in LaTeX?

Thank you in advance for your help!

P.S. Damn, phpbb deletes all the spaces left to the lines. But I hope, you can understand from my description and my example with an Office utility, what I want to do.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

you could use a tabular environment. In this example I'm using tabularx to get two columns, one with fixed width, the other using the remaining text width:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\begin{document}
\noindent%
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{p{4cm}X}
  equation & \blindtext \\
  equation & \blindtext
\end{tabularx}
\end{document}

Here's further explanation on tabular based on examples: Creating tables with LaTeX.

Stefan

[cap_gemo]

Thanks, Stefan_K, the tabularx environment worked for me - exactly in the way I wanted! Thank you very much!