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From: ogawa@orion.arc.nasa.gov (Arthur Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: TABLES - entries spanning rows
Summary: vertical spanning in LaTeX not provided for automatically
Message-ID: <1991Jan25.091123.980@news.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 25 Jan 91 09:11:23 GMT
References: <1992@fornax.UUCP>
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LaTeX does not provide for automatically vertical spanning of cells as you
are aspiring. (It is true that horizontal spanning is done via the 
\multicolumn command.) You may get the effect you desire through the 
\cline command and by faking the cell's contents, however:

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
\vbox to0pt{\vskip.5\baselineskip\hbox{SPAN}\vss}%
&\multicolumn{2}{c|}{TEST}\\
\cline{2-3}%
&TEST2&TEST3\\
\hline
\end{tabular}

will produce the result you sketched. This method is, however, not very
robust: you must center the SPAN text by hand.

I wrote a table routine for a macropackage built on Plain.tex which does
all this automatically, but you pay a high price for the functionality
in code complexity and in running time.