sf352@citycs.uucp (Paul Abraham) (11/22/89)
How do you centre a tabbing environment?
I've tried minipage and parbox, but all to no avail.
I have also RTFM.
Paul Abraham. sf352@city.{ac.uk,uucp}dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (D.A. Hosek) (11/27/89)
In article <1989Nov22.113043.21298@cs.city.ac.uk> sf352@city.ac.uk (Paul Abraham) writes: >How do you centre a tabbing environment? >I've tried minipage and parbox, but all to no avail. >I have also RTFM. OK, the manual says that if a tabbing environment is placed in a minipage whose specified width is wider than the tabbing environment, the width of the minipage will be the width of the tabbing (or similarly confusing words to that effect). Leslie _should_ have given an example. _My_ book which should be out next summer does (blatant plug), and it looks something like this: \begin{center} \begin{minipage}{\textwidth} \begin{tabbing} --- Some tabbing crud goes here --- \end{tabbing} \end{minipage} \end{center} By specifying \textwidth as the width of the minipage, the specified width of a page is the width of a full line of text. Thus, if \textwidth is, say, 4in and the tabbing environment is 3in wide, the minipage will have a width of 3in. If the tabbing environment is 5in wide, the minipage will have a width of 4in. The center environment will take the tabbing environment in the above example and center it if it is narrower than the width of the text, otherwise, it will be set flush left. Now, if the tabbing environment is _wider_ than \textwidth, you have a problem. If you experiment a bit, you will find that LaTeX normally _never_ centers anything wider than the width of a line of text (there are technical reasons why the center environment does not work like plain TeX's \centerline command). If you really want to be able to have centered items wider than \textwidth centered, you will need to do something like the following: \makeatletter \setlength{\@flushglue}{0pt plus \fill minus 1in} \makeatother \@flushglue is a rubber space inserted on each side of the text in the center environment (it is also used in the flushleft and flushright environments). The above example allows items in the center environment to stick into each margin by as much as one inch. Anything wider than that should probably be presented in a different manner. Also, for technical reasons, the "minus" part of the \@flushglue length cannot be \fill -dh -- "Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior" -Catullus D.A. Hosek. UUCP: uunet!jarthur!dhosek Internet: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu