General ⇒ Tables with narrower margins

[JoKo]

Hi,

I am writing my thesis using the book document class. I am quite pleased with the text's width, but I find it quite narrow for tables. Is there any way to for the table to start from the left sooner than the text?

[Juanjo]

You can simply put a \hspace command with a negative length right before the tabular environment or, with the help of the @{} descriptor, in the tabular mandatory argument. For example,

Code: Select all

\hspace{-3cm}
\begin{tabular}{column descriptors}
  (tabular stuff)
\end{tabular}

or

Code: Select all

\begin{tabular}{@{\hspace{-2cm}}column descriptors}
  (tabular stuff)
\end{tabular}

[localghost]

Hi,

I am writing my thesis using the book document class. I am quite pleased with the text's width, but I find it quite narrow for tables. Is there any way to for the table to start from the left sooner than the text?

You can use a trick to get centered tables hanging into the margins on both sides.

Code: Select all

\begin{table}[!ht]
  \makebox[\textwidth]{%
    \begin{tabular}{*{15}{c}}
      ...
    \end{tabular}
  }
  \caption{Table with excess width}\label{tab:widetab}
\end{table}

But I think this is a very poor result. You should think about increasing the text width with geometry. Tables that exactly fit the text width are produced with tabularx. The documentations will show you how to get things work.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

[JoKo]

You can simply put a \hspace command with a negative length right before the tabular environment or, with the help of the @{} descriptor, in the tabular mandatory argument. For example,

Code: Select all

\hspace{-3cm}
\begin{tabular}{column descriptors}
  (tabular stuff)
\end{tabular}

or

Code: Select all

\begin{tabular}{@{\hspace{-2cm}}column descriptors}
  (tabular stuff)
\end{tabular}

Thanks a lot for your help. The first example didn't produce the expected results. The second one is producing the format I wanted except for the lines ( \toprule and \hline ). I would be also glad to know the function of @ .

Hi,

I am writing my thesis using the book document class. I am quite pleased with the text's width, but I find it quite narrow for tables. Is there any way to for the table to start from the left sooner than the text?

You can use a trick to get centered tables hanging into the margins on both sides.

Code: Select all

\begin{table}[!ht]
  \makebox[\textwidth]{%
    \begin{tabular}{*{15}{c}}
      ...
    \end{tabular}
  }
  \caption{Table with excess width}\label{tab:widetab}
\end{table}

But I think this is a very poor result. You should think about increasing the text width with geometry. Tables that exactly fit the text width are produced with tabularx. The documentations will show you how to get things work.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

At first, I was trying to do something similar using minipage and then the table inside. Unfortunately, neither of those methods produced the wanted result...

Thanks for your hospitality!


JoKo

[gmedina]

Hi,

as localghost has mentioned, the result is really poor (from a typographic standpoint). However, the changepage package provides an easy solution:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{changepage}
\usepackage{lipsum}%just to genearte some text

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]
\begin{table}[!ht]
  \begin{adjustwidth}{-2.4cm}{}
    \begin{tabular}{*{14}{c}}
      text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text & text
    \end{tabular}
  \caption{Table with excess width}\label{tab:widetab}
  \end{adjustwidth}
\end{table}
\lipsum[1]
 
\end{document}

[JoKo]

Thanks a lot, gmedina!

This produces exactly the output I really wanted!

[Acide Amine]

Thanks gmedina !
Working and looking great.
Amine