Jon Bendtsen wrote:
On 23/04/2008, at 12.39, Helge Hafting wrote:
Jon Bendtsen wrote:
Hi
Why are the table too wide?
Because you wrote too much text inside.
I dont want to spent time fixing the table width. I suggest 2
possible options if the table is too wide.
1) scale font so all text can be there in one line
2) break the text inside the table into multiple lines
As you show - there are several ways of doing this. they look very
different, so
clearly the computer cannot make the choice automatically. Different
people
may want to do this differently, after all. When breaking text inside
the table,
what columns would you want to do that with? Perhaps you want one of
them
a little wider than the other because it is more important? LyX
simply can't
guess such things.
You can change the font if you like. Or you can make a table column
fixed-width
and then the text inside will break into lines automatically.
When i tried to make the table columns a fixed width with % but for
some reason 10% of pagewidth was not the 10% of pagewidth i
expected.
I want 100% to be the width of the page minus the margins. I want to
set the max table width, and then i may want to assign a max column
width to the columns based on the max table width.
* "page width" is the width of the whole page, including margins. Rarely
useful, unless
you want to put something in the margins too.
* "text width" is the width of the page, minus margins. What you asked for.
* "column width" is the width of the current column, which is the same
as "text width" unless you have a two-column document. It is
sometimes useful
to specify "column width" - that way the document adapts automatically
if you change it to two-column on some later occation. But of course,
some
things are so wide that you want "text width" for them no matter how
the rest of the document is set.
* "line width" is what I normally use, as it adapt to everything. In
normal text,
it is the same as "text width" / "column width". In a bullet list it
is the
available place for text. That is, the space used for bullets is
removed just
as the margins are. Similiar for enumerations, headings, and anything
else.
Of course a table in a enumeration might be unusual, but these
lengths can
be used for boxes and other stuff as well. Something that adapts to
"line width"
will therefore "just work" if you move it into a heading or
enumeration or whatever.
Do you know any other word processor that do this automatically - and
gets it right also?
I dont use other word processors, but i seem to remember that they
did not make tables wider than the page.
I ask because I have never seen a word processor that can do this fully
automatic in a sane way. Of course, a word processor can limit
the table to the available width when you just keep typing into the cells.
But how can it possibly decide how wide each columns should be, if you
puts lots of text into several of them? Usually, only the writer can
know which
columns are useful to limit and which should adapt to the exact width
of the widest cell. And therefore, LyX and the latex typesetter doesn't
even try.
Helge Hafting
