Tabular* \extracolsep is ignored, table borders do not meet nicely

Question

I'm trying to use a tabular* environment to create a simple table with two centered columns that are spaced apart so that the table fills the entire page.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

  \fbox{

    \begin{tabular*}{\textwidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill} } | c | c | }
    \hline
    \Large{Supervisor} & \Large{Student} \\
    \hline
    \Large{prof. X Y Z} & \Large{A B C} \\
    \hline
    \end{tabular*}

  }

\end{document}

It ends up looking like this:

Note that not only does the table not space the cells apart properly, the top and left lines of the table do not come to a nice corner.

(I don't strongly care about borders not meeting since this table will ultimately not show them, but I drew them here to help debug.)

A similar table on another person's machine looks ok, so maybe there is something I'm missing on my system?

note size commands do not take an argumnet, \Large{Supervisor} should be \Large Supervisor (although that does not change the output here) — David Carlisle, Feb 26 '20 at 21:47
\estracolsep does not affect the gap to the left of the first column, nor the gap to the right of the last column. You will need to compute the width instead. — John Kormylo, Feb 26 '20 at 21:48
@JohnKormylo I've also tried {c @{\extracolsep{\fill}} c} exactly as recommended here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/56552/145783 with approximately the same result. \hfill didn't seem to do anything. — rgov, Feb 26 '20 at 21:50

David Carlisle · Answer 1 · 2020-02-26T21:59:33.013

4

You are adding a lot of extra space

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\setlength\fboxsep{0pt}

\noindent
\hspace*{-\fboxrule}%SPACE
  \fbox{%SPACE
%SPACE
    \begin{tabular*}{\textwidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}%SPACE
} | c | c | }
    \hline
    \Large Supervisor & \Large Student  \\
    \hline
    \Large prof. X Y Z & \Large A B C \\
    \hline
    \end{tabular*}%SPACE
%SPACE
  }%SPACE
\hspace*{-\fboxrule}%SPACE

\end{document}

edited Feb 26 '20 at 21:59

answered Feb 26 '20 at 21:52

David Carlisle

757,742

The whitespace around the table is expected by the university that issued the template. For your code I still get https://imgur.com/oWyH30Y — better corners, but the cells aren't spaced quite right. – rgov Feb 26 '20 at 21:54
@rgov from the exact code I post above? that looks very wrong, can you add the full log that you get from this file (add it to my answer as a code block) or to your question – David Carlisle Feb 26 '20 at 21:55
@rgov no the whitespace was wrong. you had a paragraph indent, two \fboxrule rules from the \fbox two \fboxsep spaces form the \fbox but you forced the inner tabular to be \textwidth wide so the entire construct is overfull by \parindent+2\fboxrule+2\fboxsep so you need to set those spaces to 0 or use a value less than \textwidth in the tabular* but the other space tokens that I highlight are causing your rules not to line up at the corners. – David Carlisle Feb 26 '20 at 21:58
I added it, @David-carlisle. – rgov Feb 26 '20 at 21:58
@rgov thanks (it got rejected by the automatic site checker for some reason but I see it in the history) – David Carlisle Feb 26 '20 at 22:02
@rgov you have Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in alignment at lines 19--19 which suggests that you don't have \extracolsep also (but unlikely to be the cause) your latex format isn't updated you could use tlmgr update --all to update your texlive – David Carlisle Feb 26 '20 at 22:04
Yes, that's right! I uninstalled TeX Live 2017 today and installed 2019, and updated tlmgr, but somehow the packages never got updated. After running that command, it works. – rgov Feb 26 '20 at 22:10
@rgov ah sorry you were using a format that only lasted a few days, this change might be of interest.... % \begin{macro}{\extracolsep} .. % \changes{v1.1q}{2019/10/07}{This needs to expand} – David Carlisle Feb 26 '20 at 22:15

John Kormylo · Answer 2 · 2020-02-27T15:11:45.807

Is this what you were looking for?

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\bgroup
\Large 
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{0pt}%
\sbox0{\begin{tabular}{|c|c|}% measure width
Supervisor & Student \\
prof. X Y Z & A B C \\
\end{tabular}}%
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{\dimexpr \textwidth-\wd0}%
\divide\tabcolsep by 4
\noindent\begin{tabular}{|c|c|}
    \hline
    Supervisor & Student \\
    \hline
    prof. X Y Z & A B C \\
    \hline
    \end{tabular}
\egroup

\end{document}

This is a somewhat simpler approach which divides the tabular into two equal columns.

\documentclass{article}
\newlength{\tempdima}
\begin{document}

\bgroup
\Large 
\setlength{\tempdima}{\dimexpr 0.5\textwidth-2\tabcolsep-1.5\arrayrulewidth}%
\noindent\begin{tabular}{|c|c|}
    \hline
    \makebox[\tempdima][c]{Supervisor} & \makebox[\tempdima][c]{Student} \\
    \hline
    prof. X Y Z & A B C \\
    \hline
    \end{tabular}
\egroup

\end{document}

The OP was using a broken format # 2019-10-01 Release which was replaced by # 2019-10-01 Patch level 1 a few days later.... — David Carlisle, Feb 26 '20 at 22:17
but +1 this is what the OP should do, I concentrated on what was technically wrong in the OPs code in my answer rather than give a better approach:-) — David Carlisle, Feb 26 '20 at 22:27

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 26 '20 at 23:33

Since you obviously don't want the rules at the end, I make three proposals. Using a macro is a good way to postpone the decision at the end without changing the document proper.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{showframe} % in order to see the page margins

\newcommand{\supervisorstudentA}[2]{%
  \par\noindent
  \begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Supervisor \\ prof.\ #1 \end{tabular}\hfill
  \begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Student \\ #2 \end{tabular}\par
}
\newcommand{\supervisorstudentB}[2]{%
  \par\noindent
  \hspace*{4em}
  \begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Supervisor \\ prof.\ X Y Z \end{tabular}\hfill
  \begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Student \\ A B C \end{tabular}%
  \hspace*{4em}\par
}
\newcommand{\supervisorstudentC}[2]{%
  \par\noindent
  \hspace*{\stretch{0.25}}%
  \makebox[0pt]{\begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Supervisor \\ prof.\ X Y Z \end{tabular}}%
  \hspace*{\stretch{0.5}}%
  \makebox[0pt]{\begin{tabular}[t]{@{}c@{}} Student \\ A B C \end{tabular}}%
  \hspace*{\stretch{0.25}}\par
}

\begin{document}

\supervisorstudentA{X Y Z}{A B C}

\bigskip

\supervisorstudentB{X Y Z}{A B C}

\bigskip

\supervisorstudentC{X Y Z}{A B C}

\end{document}

In the third one the two parts are exactly midway in either half of the text width.

Tabular* \extracolsep is ignored, table borders do not meet nicely

3 Answers3