[comp.text.tex] LaTeX: dotted vertical bars in tabular

allan@rind.cs.cornell.edu (James Allan) (10/26/90)

With any luck, there will be an obvious solution to this problem.  A
secretary here at Cornell wants to create a table in LaTeX such that
some of the columns are separated by a dotted rather than a solid
line.

I couldn't find anything obvious in the LaTeX manual (I don't seem to
have a copy of the TeX book).  Playing around, I came up with this
far-from-pretty solution:

	\newcommand{\dotsep}{$\,\;\stackrel{\textstyle\cdot}{\cdot}\,\;$}
	\begin{tabular}{l@{\dotsep}l}
	...

If you've finished retching because of the sheer disgustingness of the
solution, let me point out that not only is it kind of gross, but it
doesn't even work quite right--the dots don't look all that nice.

Can someone tell me if there is a better solution to this little
puzzle?  Better yet, if there IS a solution, can someone tell me what
it is\ldots

Thank you.
			-- james