On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 08:57:45PM -0500, David Soukal wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am still consistently working on my thesis, spreading the awarness of
> LyX's greatness along the way... :) yet I've run into another little
> problem that I was unable to solve easily with at-hands documentation.
>
> I am trying to report some data in tables and I have come across the
> following obstacles that I don't know how to solve:
>
> 1) is it possible to have a table with individual cells within a column
> aligned differently?
>
Yes, with a small trick. Set the column to left aligned.
When you want a right-aligned cell, insert a hfill before the
text. The hfill will push cell contents to the right.
You'll find it somehwere under the insert menu.
This trick also allow right-aligned cells in a centered column.
Unfortunately, you can't create a left-aligned cell in a right-aligned
column as easy, because a trailing hfill is ignored. Fix this by having a
protected blank (insert menu again) after the trailing hfill.
If you need to force a *centered* cell, you should do:
protected_blank hfill celltext hfill protected blank
The reason for the leading protected blank is to get proper
centering - protected blanks have a width so only a trailing one
won't do.
If you should need a justified cell, use hfills instead of spaces between
words. I cannot imagine the need for this though.
> 2) while 1) may sound strange, I'd like to have, for example, a column
> with numbers centered while the header of the column is aligned, say,
> flushed left.
Sure you don't want the header centered too, when all the content is?
>
> 3) another practical, related, problem is the decimal-aligned columns
> created using the dcolumn package. When I use the d{} alignment for a
> column (bless Extended Features manual :), the numbers withing the
> column are indeed aligned on the "." but the header text of the column
> is in italics font (easily fixable, yet awkward, with \textrm{}) and it
> is aligned so that the last letter is right aligned with the decimal
> point of the rest of the column. I would like to have the numbers
> aligned on the decimal point, while the header text being, say, centered.
>
Read Extended.lyx again:
"Setting the multicolumn attribute for a single cell makes it insensitive to
the decimal alignment which comes in handy as well."
Just tried it - the cell is now centered and no unusual font either.
> Is this possible at all? I realize I could perhaps solve 1) & 2) with
> another nested table (an HTML hell :) but I'm not so sure with 3).
>
> Thanks for any hints & pointer!
>
If you need to do something really awkward in a table cell, insert a
minipage there. You can put just about anything in a minipage,
including all sorts of alignments, multiple lines, and so on.
Helge Hafting
