Self reflowing tables on the whole page

Question

I need to reproduce the following 2 layouts ( in landscape, if that matters ) involving just and only tables :

The first layout is just 1 long table that spans from the upper left to the bottom right corner, the entries of the table should auto-fit themselves for the right amount of vertical space . The important thing is that the entire page is being used .

The second problem is about the same but instead of having just 1 table I have more tables; and all the tables still need to auto-adjust together from the upper left corner to the bottom right one, but I would also like to tune the vertical spacing between each single table ( red space in the picture ) and the entries of each table should auto-fit the vertical space according to the space left by my adjustments .

I gave a rapid overview to the manual / docs / pdf of the tabularx package but I don't think it says anything about this kind of alignment and fitting so I'm looking for solutions and suggestions .

Note that I don't need anything else apart from the tabular data itself on this document, I don't need a title or other components of the documents ( footnotes, page numbers, etc etc ) , I can use the entire page just for the tables .

Thanks for the help .

Answer 1

Rather than using tables for this I would define a custom pics using tikz -- you can read all about pics in section 18.2 of the tikz manual (version 3.0.1a) -- and I'd then wrap everything into a custom macro so that the commands

\GrayTable{1,1,1,1}
\newpage

\RedTable{0.8,0.1,0.4,0.3}

would produce the two pages

The numbers in the comma separated list given to \GrayTable become the numbers printed in the table. In the \RedTable macro, the numbers give the "relative" height of the line in each column and the numbers in the table cells are automatically generated as in the MWE.

Using tikzpagenodes I have made the table fill the full "text area" of the page. There would probably be printing issues, but you could make the table fill the entire page by replacing all occurrences of current page header area with current page.

In fact, the macros below are slightly more general in that, within reason, they are not restricted to four columns and in exactly the same way produce (see the second example in the MWE below):

Here is the full code:

\documentclass[svgnames]{article}
\usepackage[a4paper, landscape]{geometry}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}
\usepackage{tikzpagenodes}

\tikzset{
  gray cell/.style = {
      rectangle,
      fill=SlateGray,
      draw=LightGray,
      line width=2mm,
      anchor=north west,
      minimum height=\textheight,
      font=\Huge
  },
  pics/gray cells/.style args = {#1}{
     code = {
        % count the number of columns
        \foreach \x [count=\c, remember=\c as \C] in {#1} {};
        \foreach \x [count=\c, evaluate=\c as \r using {\c/\C}] in {#1} {
          \node[gray cell, minimum width=\textwidth/\C] at
            ($ (current page header area.north west)!\r!(current page header area.north east) $)
            {\x};
        }
     }
  },
  gray line/.style = {
    fill=LightGray,
    draw=LightGray,
  },
  red line/.style = {
    fill=Red,
    draw=Red,
  },
  pics/red cells/.style args = {#1}{
    code = {
      % count the number of columns

      \foreach \cell [count=\c, remember=\c as \C] in {#1} {};
      \foreach \x [count=\c, evaluate=\c as \r using {\c/\C},
                   evaluate=\c as \d using {int(\c+1)}] in {#1} {
        \node[gray cell, minimum width=\textwidth/\C] (RC\c) at
          ($ (current page header area.north west)!\r!(current page header area.north east) $){};
        \coordinate (RCL\c) at ($ (RC\c.north west)!\x!(RC\c.south west)+(0,1mm) $);
        \coordinate (RCR\c) at ($ (RC\c.north east)!\x!(RC\c.south east)-(0,1mm) $);
        \draw[gray line] (RCL\c) rectangle (RCR\c);
        \draw[red line] ($ (RCL\c)+(8mm,0) $) rectangle ($ (RCR\c)-(8mm,0) $);
        \node[font=\Huge] at ($ (-0.8,0.8) + (RCR\c.north east) $) {\c};
        \node[font=\Huge] at ($ (-0.8,0.8) + (RC\c.south east) $) {\d};
      }
    }
  }
}

\newcommand\GrayTable[1]{\tikz{\pic at (0,0) {gray cells={#1}};}}
\newcommand\RedTable[1]{\tikz{\pic at (0,0) {red cells={#1}};}}

\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}

\GrayTable{1,1,1,1}
\newpage

\RedTable{0.8,0.1,0.4,0.3}
\newpage

\GrayTable{1,2,3,4,5,6}
\newpage

\RedTable{0.8,0.1,0.5,0.7,0.4,0.3}

\end{document}