Decrease spacing between lines of paragraph in longtable.

Question

I used the suggestion from Adding row spacing to a longtable? to decrease the row spacing in my longtable.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\begin{document}

\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{0.7}
\begin{longtable}{ l | l | l }
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & a small phrase
\end{longtable}

\end{document}

produces

Example screenshot of working code

But if I have a p column

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\begin{document}

\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{0.7}
\begin{longtable}{ l | l | p{5 cm} }
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & here is a long sentence which wraps to the next line \\
    a & b & a small phrase
\end{longtable}

\end{document}

The spacing between the lines of the paragraph doesn't get reduced.

Example screenshot of problem

How can I also reduce the spacing between the paragraph lines?

I also read Longtable with multicolumn and parbox spacing issues, but the example was so complex, I wasn't sure whether the problem was the same at all.

The line spacing wasn't reduced because it is not related to \arraystretch. :) Maybe \linespread{<value>} could be of use, but I'm not too keen on this table layout. — Paulo Cereda, Jul 14 '15 at 16:34
Do you have serious reasons to decrease rowspacing. Generally, latex tables are considered having a very tight spacing, and can easily be hard to read. — Bernard, Jul 14 '15 at 16:38
@Bernard My actual table covers three pages with the default longtable spacing. I thought imitating the default spacing of tabular would make it more compact and easier to scan. — 2cents, Jul 14 '15 at 17:11
@Cecilia: Another solution consists in reducing the font size to, say, \footnotesize. Inside a paragraph cell, use \linespread{…}as mantioned by @Paulo Cereda, or (perhaps better) \setstretch{…}, from the setspace package. — Bernard, Jul 14 '15 at 17:16

AboAmmar · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-14T17:16:21.343

10

You can also set line spacing locally in a clean way as this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{setspace}
\begin{document}

\begin{spacing}{.7}
\begin{longtable}{ l | l | p{5 cm} }
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & here is a long sentence which wraps to the next line, here is a long sentence which wraps to the next line \\
    a & b & a small phrase
\end{longtable}
\end{spacing}

\end{document}

enter image description here

edited Jul 14 '15 at 17:16

answered Jul 14 '15 at 17:11

AboAmmar

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I like this solution best because I can use the spacing 1.0 and get exactly the same spacing as the rest of the document. I don't have to figure out the conversion for the default longtable row spacing. – 2cents Jul 14 '15 at 17:30
Neat. What if \begin{spacing}{0} is not tight enough? Negative values don't do anything... – PatrickT Jul 11 '18 at 17:17

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 12 '18 at 09:30

For some reason I didn't like the output of the setspacing package, and struggled to find that simply modifying \baselineskip would do. Maybe this can help people in the future:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{array} %<================= Added this

\begin{document}

%\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{0.7}
\begin{longtable}{ l | l | >{\baselineskip=10pt}p{5 cm} }
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & a small phrase \\
    a & b & here is a long sentence which wraps to the next line \\
    a & b & a small phrase
\end{longtable}

\end{document}

The notation >{declaration} add declaration before every instance of the p{} column. Also, notice that I added the array package.

Very neat. You can also define a column type like so (for instance): \newcolumntype{L}[1]{>{\flushleft\arraybackslash}>{\baselineskip=0pt}p{#1}} Sadly it won't take negative spacing and, for some reason, zero spacing is not tight enough for me... — PatrickT, Jul 11 '18 at 17:21

Decrease spacing between lines of paragraph in longtable.

2 Answers2