Column-wide formatting changes with tabular

Question

I must be doing something wrong, but I follow the example precisely (as precisely as someone could reasonably guarantee) and LaTeX yet refuses to compile the document:

ERROR: LaTeX Error: Illegal character in array arg.

--- TeX said ---

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.4 \begin{tabular}{>{\bfseries}rl}

--- HELP ---
There is an illegal character in the argument of an array or tabular
environment, or in the second argument of a \multicolumn command.

Here is my MWE:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{>{\bfseries}rl}
  hi & bye
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

@Werner - it isn't even that complicated, but that's a really cool package! While it has similar syntax, it could confuse someone who was only looking at TeX.SE. This is something that can be (and was) solved by nitpicking through the LaTeX Wikibook. — Sean Allred, Jun 19 '13 at 18:37

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 19 '13 at 18:21

I figured it out - it was a pretty dumb mistake.

My source didn't mention you had to \usepackage{array}:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{>{\bfseries}rl}
  hi & bye
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

works as expected.

Column-wide formatting changes with tabular

1 Answers1