Kenward Vaughan wrote:
I've been finishing off a periodic table which I can insert into any classroom document, and am struggling to get the elements' masses to center in the cells. When I get up to numbers such as 123.45 it becomes evident that the cells have a preconceived notion about how far **left** they will place text; this leaves the right side pushing into the border of the adjacent cell. I have reduced the font size to smallest--any more makes it too small.
Is this a fixed-width column? If not, I don't see why the right side would intrude on the border -- the column should just get wider.
I'd like to get the table to change this padding to something less, but can't find the command despite repeated searches. I guess I don't have the right keywords? The whole table would be set to center alignment. I figure there's got to be a command out there for it, but I can't find one that works yet (or perhaps I misused one already without knowing it). Does anyone know one? Does it have to be applied on a cell-by-cell basis or will it work on the whole table?
I'm not aware of any separate left and right side padding, but then I'm not TeXpert. The length \tabcolsep is supposed to control the amount of space left between columns. It's described as half the intracolumn separation, which I take to mean that LaTeX will pad both sides of a table cell by that much. You could try \setlength{\tabcolsep}{something smaller} and see if it helps.
/Paul
