Odd tabular first line justification behavior

Question

So I have the following table:

\begin{tabular}{l | r}\label{tab:cost}
    Budget Item & Cost \\
    \hline{}
    Books & \$825 \\
    Room/Board & \$12,100 \\
    Personal & \$2,265 \\
    Transportation & \$400 \\
    Resident Tutition & \$11,000
\end{tabular}

And the justification for the left hand side of the first line is a bit off as seen in the following image:

Note the space before the word 'books' in that table. Is there any way to remove that space? I tried forcing a line break after the horizontal line with \\ which fixes the alignment of books, but that adds a bit of vertical space that I'd rather not have.

Thnaks in advance, Avi Caspe

PS: if it helps I am using TeXMaker on Windows, installed from the MiKTeX site. I doubt that matters, but it may.

\hline does not take an argument, so don't use \hline{}, but \hline instead. {} together with the line ending inserts a spurious space at the start of the Books cell. — Werner, Dec 19 '17 at 04:03

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 19 '17 at 03:55

2

The solution to your problem is very simple.

All you have to do is eliminate the {} after \hline.

Your code then will be

\begin{tabular}{l | r}\label{tab:cost}
    Budget Item & Cost \\ \hline
    Books & \$825 \\
    Room/Board & \$12,100 \\
    Personal & \$2,265 \\
    Transportation & \$400 \\
    Resident Tutition & \$11,000
\end{tabular}

As a result, you will get $Table without {} after \hline$

Hope it will help you.

answered Dec 19 '17 at 03:55

Mauramz

1,464

Why is this an issue at all? Why does an extra set of curly braces cause this issue? – Avi Caspe Dec 19 '17 at 04:22
@AviCaspe: See my comment and also What is the use of percent signs (%) at the end of lines? – Werner Dec 19 '17 at 04:57
@AviCaspe A line of code ending on a macro name (like \hline) does not see the end-of-line as a trailing space (in essence, the end-of-line is absorbed as the terminator to the macro name); where as a line of code that ends on a normal character, such as } will see the end-of-line as a space, unless you trail the line with a % immediately after the }. – Steven B. Segletes Dec 19 '17 at 10:24

Odd tabular first line justification behavior

1 Answers1