12

With this MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabulary}

\begin{document}

\hrule

\begin{center}
  \begin{tabulary}{\textwidth}{|L|L|L|}
    foo&bar&baz
  \end{tabulary}
\end{center}

\hrule

\end{document}

I get a table which is narrower than the page: example

But I'd like the table to be spread out to \textwidth like tabularx would do. Is this possible?

Or is there an alternative approach?

David Carlisle
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Stephan Lehmke
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  • 2
    tabulary won't make a column wider than needed. It first typesets the table as if it were lll and then sets the widths only for columns that need to be set as paragraphs. – egreg Dec 15 '12 at 11:33
  • 1
    @egreg Thanks for the explanation of the behaviour. I still think it's counterintuitive because I see tabulary as a more intelligent tabularx and tabularx does spread out. – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 14:08
  • They have different purposes; try foo&bar&\lipsum[1] to see what happens. – egreg Dec 15 '12 at 14:12
  • 1
    As soon as the table is overfull the result is as expected. I was looking at the underfull case. – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 14:22
  • Wouldn't tabu be an alternative: \begin{tabu} to \textwidth {|X[l]|X[l]|X[l]|} foo&bar&baz \end{tabu}? – cgnieder Dec 15 '12 at 14:33
  • @cgnieder From what I see in the tabu documentation, the X column from tabu will behave as in tabularx. Will it adapt to the content width as in tabulary? – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 15:25
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    I think it does with negative coefficients: \begin{tabu}to\linewidth{X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]} (not sure, though) – cgnieder Dec 15 '12 at 15:36
  • @cgnieder Great! This seems to be the answer to my question. If you make this an answer I'll accept it. – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 16:38

3 Answers3

7

The patch in the other answer probably ought to have worked but it turns out the division algorithm used isn't really that accurate in the case that it is scaling up, and as Stephen noticed if you simply let it scale, rounding errors make the table wider than the line and you get overfull box warnings. This is basically the same but corrects the division result before scaling up the table.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[debugshow]{tabulary}

\makeatletter

\def\foo#1\def\TY@ratio#2#3!!{
\def\TY@checkmin{#1%
 \@tempdima\TY@ratio\TY@tablewidth
 \ifdim\@tempdima>\TY@linewidth
  \advance\@tempdima-\TY@linewidth
  \Gscale@div\@tempb\@tempdima\TY@tablewidth
  \@tempdimb\TY@ratio\p@
  \advance\@tempdimb-\@tempb\p@
  \edef\TY@ratio{\strip@pt\@tempdimb}%
\fi
#3}}
\expandafter\foo\TY@checkmin!!



\makeatother

\begin{document}

\hrule

\begin{center}
  \begin{tabulary}{\textwidth}{|L|L|L|}
    foo&bar&baz
  \end{tabulary}
\end{center}

\hrule

\end{document}
David Carlisle
  • 757,742
6

Ok, I now made the following patch:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd\TY@checkmin
{\def\TY@ratio{1}}
{%
  \@tempdima\dimexpr\p@*\TY@linewidth/\TY@tablewidth\relax
  \edef\TY@ratio{\strip@pt\@tempdima}%
}{}{}
\let\TY@@checkmin\TY@checkmin
\makeatother

which seems to do what I want:

second example

Still, the calculation doesn't seem to be as exact as it could be and I'd like to know whether there is a more suitable solution.

Furthermore, I'm more or less undoing an explicit special case from the package code, so I assume it was there for a reason ;-)

Edit

Note that tabulary still behaves differently from tabularx in this case. See for instance 

\begin{center}
  \begin{tabulary}{\textwidth}{|L|L|L|}
    foo foo foo foo foo foo foo &bar&baz
  \end{tabulary}
\end{center}

example 2

So even when "spreading", the column width is still proportional to the amount of material in the column, which seems to be a good thing to me.

Stephan Lehmke
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  • 1
    And where does it differ from \begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|*{3}{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}X|}}? – egreg Dec 15 '12 at 14:17
  • It is different in the case that the table is overfull. – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 14:19
  • @egreg see my edit – Stephan Lehmke Dec 15 '12 at 16:24
  • 2
    Never assume reason, especially when shown signs of unreasonable behaviour. – David Carlisle Dec 16 '12 at 00:29
  • 1
    @DavidCarlisle I'd still like to know which behaviour (when there is "too little" material in the table) you prefer, and why. – Stephan Lehmke Dec 16 '12 at 00:39
  • 3
    As you commented in chat, the current behaviour seems a little unintuitive as you specify a table width and get a smaller one. It's all a long time ago but I suspect the reason was that TY began life as a request from someone doing automated publishing from SGML and wanted a table macro that just "did the right thing"™ In that scenario the width argument was never consciously used (was always \textwidth) and the package set the table to natural with and only kicked in if it was too wide. But for human authoring you could decide to use tabular if you don't want the forced width.... – David Carlisle Dec 16 '12 at 00:48
5

tabu seems to do what you want given one specifies negative coefficients to the X columns. Quoting the manual:

negativ width coefficients can be given to X columns:

ex. X[-2.5]X[1] or X[-2.5]X or X[-5]X[2]

In this case, the first X column will be at most two and a half wider than the second one, and if the natural width of the first X column is finally less than 2.5 × (the width of the second column) then it will be narrowed down to this natural width.

tabu forgets to put a \strut in its cells, though, a fact one probably should keep in mind.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\hrule
\begin{center}
  \begin{tabu}to\linewidth{|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|}
   foo&bar&baz
  \end{tabu}
\end{center}
\hrule
\begin{center}
  \begin{tabu}to\linewidth{|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|}
   foo&bar&\lipsum[2]
  \end{tabu}
\end{center}
\hrule
\begin{center}
  \begin{tabu}to\linewidth{|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|X[-1,l]|}
   foo foo foo foo foo foo foo &bar&baz
  \end{tabu}
\end{center}
\hrule
\end{document}

enter image description here

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cgnieder
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