Making LaTeX tables smaller?

Question

I have a LaTeX table that looks like this:

\begin{table}[!ht]
\centering
\small
\caption{
\bf{Caption}}
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c|l|c|c|c|c|c}
field1 & field 2 & ... \\ 
\hline
...

the problem is that even with "\small" the table is too big, since I use:

\usepackage{setspace} 
\doublespacing

in the header. How can I:

Make the table single spaced? and
Make the table smaller?

I'd like it to fit on an entire page.

score 127 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 14 '15 at 19:02

127

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables#Resize_tables talks about two ways to do this.

I used:

\scalebox{0.7}{
  \begin{tabular}
    ...
  \end{tabular}
}

edited Dec 14 '15 at 19:02

maskacovnik

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answered Apr 23 '12 at 08:16

Krzysztof Voss

1,766
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2

This approach has several serve disadvantages. Amongst others this will result in inhomogeneous fontsizes throughout the document and a suboptimal choice of letter shapes, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/425453/why-not-scale-elements-that-contain-text for more details – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Jul 01 '19 at 12:26

score 71 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 02 '10 at 07:10

71

As well as \singlespacing mentioned previously to reduce the height of the table, a useful way to reduce the width of the table is to add \tabcolsep=0.11cm before the \begin{tabular} command and take out all the vertical lines between columns. It's amazing how much space is used up between the columns of text. You could reduce the font size to something smaller than \small but I normally wouldn't use anything smaller than \footnotesize.

answered Apr 02 '10 at 07:10

Rob Hyndman

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This is the answer I was looking for. So many ask you to individually size the columns, when just narrowing the spacing of the whole table is so much easier – Electric Coffee Dec 09 '22 at 09:48

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 01 '10 at 20:49

if it's too long for one page, use the longtable package. and if it's too wide for the page, use p{width} in place of l,r, or c for the column specifier. you can also go smaller than \small, i.e. \footnotesize and \tiny. I would consult the setspace package for options on how to remove the double space, though it's probably \singlespace or something like that.

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 28 '13 at 02:39

6

There is also the singlespace environment:

\begin{singlespace}
\end{singlespace}

answered Aug 28 '13 at 02:39

Penz

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should it be inside `\begin{tabular}` ? – alper Sep 30 '20 at 15:47

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 01 '10 at 23:34

3

You could add \singlespacing near the beginning of your table. See the setspace instructions for more options.

answered Apr 01 '10 at 23:34

John

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score 0 · Answer 6 · edited Jul 01 '19 at 10:55

0

If you want a smaller table (e.g. if your table extends beyond the area that can be displayed) you can simply change:

\usepackage[paper=a4paper]{geometry} to \usepackage[paper=a3paper]{geometry}.

Note that this only helps if you don't plan on printing your table out, as it will appear way too small, then.

edited Jul 01 '19 at 10:55

Jan Sršeň

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answered Jul 01 '19 at 07:14

Valentin

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Making LaTeX tables smaller?

6 Answers6