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I would like to put a brace in front of some table rows. I found a similar question here and in an answer the use of the bigdelim package is suggested.

The problem is, it does not seem to work if a row contains a lot of text that is wrapped to multiple lines. Here is an example to illustrate the problem:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{multirow,bigdelim}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
  \begin{tabular}{ccl}
    \ldelim\{{3}{3mm}[a] & \ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[x] &
    \begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth}
      \blindtext
    \end{minipage}\\
    &\ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[y] & More text\\
    &\ldelim\{{1}{3mm}[z] & More text
  \end{tabular}
\end{document}

This produces the following: compiled example

What I would like is to let the brace x span over all of the lorem ipsum text and the brace a to span over all three table rows.

How can I achieve this (using \ldelim is not a strict requirement, but I like the syntax)?

EDIT: Note that the minipage I use to hold the text does not only need to contain text but also e.g. a tikzpicture or some small tabular (I'm not exactly sure yet…). So the minipages height does not need to be a multiple of the height of a line of text.

Moriambar
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siegi
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  • \ldelim has an option that tells how many lines it should span, and right now it is set to use 3 lines. Change it to 13 and add [t] option to the minipage and it should work. (\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}). But I don't think a minipage solution is the right thing for you. Can you include your own case here? – percusse Jun 01 '13 at 07:52
  • @percusse Thanks! The documentation describes the option as "…extends over the n rows…", so I didn't think about setting it to a higher number than I have rows in the table. See my edit to the question for why your solution does not work and why I would like to use the minipage. Any other ideas? – siegi Jun 01 '13 at 08:15
  • You can look at Gonzalo's solution from the same question too. – percusse Jun 01 '13 at 08:17
  • @percusse Thanks again! If possible I'd like to avoid specifying the braces height, it should always be "as tall as needed". But I think I'll give Herberts answer a try (even if the syntax is a bit awkward, in my opinion), if no other solution pops up… – siegi Jun 01 '13 at 08:30

1 Answers1

2

You can get most of this effect by using the \left and \right commands from mathmode. It's not a great solution though, as the horizontal alignment is not great. Then again, you might be able to just tweak it manually.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
  $a \left\{\begin{array}{l}
    x \left\{\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth} \blindtext \end{minipage}\right.
    \\
    y\left\{\mbox{More text}\right.
    \\
    z\left\{\mbox{More text}\right.
  \end{array}\right.$
\end{document}

enter image description here

David Carlisle
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John Wickerson
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  • Thanks, this works and does what I want, even though the syntax is a bit awkward in my opinion… :-P I'll accept this answer, if nothing else shows up ;-) – siegi Jun 01 '13 at 10:34