Take the 2-minute tour ×   In a longtable, how do I retrieve the
width of the longest line for each column?   I'd like to use the
longtable environment in combination with the ltablex package.
The latter allows for weighting the columns, such that column 2
is twice as large as column 1, for instance.  I have many tables
to format, and due to their data source it's not possible to
give the tables any hint on column widths. As often there is a
lot of text in one or two columns, but little text in the
others, it doesn't make sense to just use X columns. Therefore,
I'd like to dynamically adjust the proportions of the table.  My
idea is to find the width of the longest line of each column.
Using these width it should then be possible to calculate the
proportions correctly (while granting each column a mininum
width).  Thanks for your help!  share|improve this question add
comment  1 Answer  up vote 2 down vote accepted  That is
essentially a description of tabulary as opposed to tabularx so
you can look in the so