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I have a program and I want to output the program results as PDF. I am considering to use LATEX to do the work. My results may contain many big tables, I just realized it is not so direct to output long tables in LATEX (for example, need longtable package).

My question is, longtable is the best solution or most popular one? Any alternatives?

David Carlisle
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postit
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  • Welcome to TeX.SX! xtab and supertabular are alternatives (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/133/), though I cannot say how they compare to longtable. – Torbjørn T. Jul 30 '14 at 15:22
  • longtable or ltablex is okay. is okay –  Jul 30 '14 at 15:24
  • Perhaps a MWE would be helpful, to test one or the other features by different packages? –  Jul 30 '14 at 15:34
  • longtable has one advantage over the others in that it is part of the core latex distribution so anyone who has latex has it. This is not so much an issue now as it used to be as these days most people get tex from a large distribution such as texlive which has many contributed packages as well, but it may still be a consideration if you are generating code for others to process. – David Carlisle Jul 30 '14 at 16:08
  • longtabu also does this, I think, and maybe some of the other newer table packages. ctan will have a list for an appropriate topic, I'm sure. – cfr Jul 30 '14 at 22:05
  • I've made the package cals to support generation of decorated tables. Maybe you find it useful. http://www.ctan.org/pkg/cals – olpa Jul 31 '14 at 05:59
  • Are your tables really tables? A lot of things people do with tabular can be better done with lists or other means. – Ulrike Fischer Sep 30 '14 at 12:25

2 Answers2

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multipage table packages include at least longtable, supertabular, tabu, xtab, cals. They all have good and bad points.

I do not understand your comment that it is not "direct" to output long tables. Most latex functionality is provided in class or package files that have to be referenced from the document. table environment and sectioning commands like \section require a class such as article for example, they are not defined in the latex format.

Of the packages mentioned above, longtable is part of the core latex release, but these days most people use tex from large distributions like texlive or miktex so there is not really any problem in using instead one of the contributed packages, if you prefer.

David Carlisle
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I suggest longtblr in tabularray over longtable in case someone needs it.

kilasuelika
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