### The design of tables

In recent years, several authors have argued that the examples, set out by Lamport in his LaTeX manual, have cramped authors' style and have led to extremely poor table design. It is in fact difficult even to work out what many of the examples in Lamport's book "mean".

The criticism focuses on the excessive use of rules (both horizontal and vertical) and on the poor vertical spacing that Lamport's macros offer.

The problem of vertical spacing is plain for all to see, and is addressed in several packages - see "spacing of lines in tables".

The argument about rules is presented in the excellent essay that prefaces the documentation of Simon Fear's booktabs package.

Lamport's LaTeX was also inflexibly wrong in "insisting" that captions should come at the bottom of a table. Since a table may extend over several pages, traditional typography places the caption at the top of a table float. The `\caption` command will get its position wrong (by `10pt`) if you simply write:

    \begin{table}
      \caption{Example table}
      \begin{tabular}{...}
        ...
      \end{tabular}
    \end{table}

The topcapt package solves this problem:

    \usepackage{topcaption}
    ...
    \begin{table}
      \topcaption{Example table}
      \begin{tabular}{...}
        ...
      \end{tabular}
    \end{table}

Doing the job yourself is pretty easy: topcapt switches the values of the LaTeX2e parameters `\abovecaptionskip` (default value `10pt`) and `\belowcaptionskip` (default value `0pt`), so:

    \begin{table}
      \setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{0pt}
      \setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{10pt}
      \caption{Example table}
      \begin{tabular}{...}
        ...
      \end{tabular}
    \end{table}

does the job. (The package is very slightly more elaborate...)

`booktabs.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/booktabs (zip, browse)
`topcapt.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/misc/topcapt.sty

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