tabular* is a tabular that takes its width first - #219
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\begin{tabular*}{W}{spec} was undefined, so its width and its column spec were
typeset as running text and the body set as a paragraph — "0.9@lcr un deux trois"
on the page where a table belongs. One IEEEtran paper in the corpus uses it ten
times; eight uses across four of the 200 arXiv papers.
LaTeX reads the width and is then tabular, with the alignment packed to it
(latex.ltx:12092):
\@namedef{tabular*}#1{\setlength\dimen@{#1}\edef\@halignto{to\the\dimen@}\@tabular}
so the body, the rules, \\ and & behave exactly as in tabular and the width is a
target for the inter-column glue. Here the assembled box is packed to that width,
which is what \extracolsep{\fill} in the preamble asks for; a table wider than the
request keeps its natural width rather than overlapping its columns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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\begin{tabular*}{W}{spec}was undefined, so its width and its column spec weretypeset as running text and the body set as a paragraph — the page carried
where a table belongs. One IEEEtran paper in the corpus uses it ten times; across
the 200 arXiv papers, eight uses in four papers.
LaTeX reads the width and is then
tabular, with the alignment packed to it(latex.ltx:12092):
so the body, the rules,
\\and&behave exactly as intabular, and the widthis a target for the inter-column glue. Here the assembled box is packed to that
width — what
@{\extracolsep{\fill}}in the preamble is asking for. A table whosenatural width already exceeds the request keeps it, rather than overlapping its
columns (TeX's overfull
\hbox).Measured: no page-count change on the corpus — the tables were being set, badly, as
text of about the same bulk. What changes is that they are now tables and the
preamble no longer appears in the prose. A test pins both: no
200pt,extracolseporlrin the text, and a box at least as wide as the request.🤖 Generated with Claude Code