Typesetting Tables with Booktabs

Nick Higham, whom I’ve written about several times before [1, 2, 3, 4] is a mathematician at the University of Manchester. As an academic and book author he does a lot of publishing and, of course, one of his go to tools is LaTeX. He cares very much about the appearance of his publications so he puts in the time to make LaTeX tweaks to get things just right.

In a recent post, he talks about the Booktabs package that he’s recently started using to typeset tables. The post looks at two versions of a table from one of his books. The first uses the usual LaTeX markup and the second uses Booktabs. He says, and I agree, that the Booktabs table looks nicer and is less cluttered. In particular, the Booktabs package eschews vertical rules. That goes a long way towards making the tables look sleeker. Like Higham, I’m always inclined to add vertical rules but Org-mode doesn’t use them by default and I’ve grown used to tables without them so their absence in the Booktabs tables doesn’t bother me. Take a look at Higham’s post and see what you think.

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