Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!murdu!viccol!dougcc From: Douglas.Miller@viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: How wide are the columns? Message-ID: <6456.272c7c52@csv.viccol.edu.au> Date: 30 Oct 90 00:00:33 GMT References: <1990Oct23.164400.1393@millipore.com> Organization: Computer Services, Victoria College, Melbourne Lines: 42 In article , rcbatg@rwc.urc.tue.nl (Tonnie Geraets) writes: > duchier@cs.yale.edu (Denys Duchier) writes: >>Read p185 of the LaTeX manual. The following code should then become >>clear: > >>\newlength{\length} >>\setlength{\length}{0.5\linewidth} > . >>\begin{tabular*}{\linewidth}{|p{\length}|p{\length}|} > >>--Denys > > But what to do I have some more columns (whith different widths) and I want > a column which fills the rest of the line. Something like this: > > | This is column one | two | anonother | And finaly, this column fills up to | > | | | | the end of the line. | > | another entry | two | column | I don't want to specify the width | > | | | | myself, simply because I don't know | > > or > > | Column one | Now this column is much wider than in the previous example | > | | but fills up the whole width also | Easy (:-), just produce the table twice. The first time, guess a width for the paragraph column, and put the resulting table into a box. Use the width of the box to calculate the true paragrpah width, and produce the table again. There are two ways I know of to access the text of your table multiple times: 1. Write an pseudo environment that is really a macro (like the verbatim environment). Having all your text as a macro can have nasty side effects though. 2. Write an environment to first write the text to a temorary file (warning --- this is harder than it sounds) and then read in the text two or more times as it experiments with paragraph widths.