[texhax] Cayley Tables (Group Theory)

[Philip G. Ratcliffe]

> Hope someone can help here - this is my first post and I'm a novice with
> TeX so I need examples to learn from; I've done a fair bit of searching
> and have drawn a blank, so please don't flame me if the answer to my
> question is in what you think is an obvious place.  I've seen some of the
> posts on here recently.. and well.. you guys need to get out more and
> relax :-) But seriously...

Well, that's for everyone to decide by themselves.  But enough said...

> I want to make Cayley tables in either pure TeX or LateX - it doesn't
> matter as long as they look nice (*).
> [snip]
> I found one solitary page which had some tables which looked good, but it
> was only in PDF:
> http://departments.mwc.edu/~jkoniecz/jkoniecz/431sol.pdf

Why don't you try asking the author for the source?

> [snip]
> So my question is:  are there any public-domain examples of Cayley tables
> in LaTeX/TeX?
>
> TIA,
> DC-H.
>
> (*) I found one which was essentially a square matrix with some blank
> entries - I looking more for an actual table with at least two dark lines
> to mark the borders.  I also want to shade some of the cells to highlight
> various entries.

Since there appears to be nothing intrinsically special about Cayley tables,
I would suggest just taking a look at any construction of tables with thick
and thin lines and colouring.

Probably the booktabs package has all that you need.  However, you might
also want to look at, e.g., the following packages and their documentation:
array, colortbl, tabls.

If your German is up to it there is a tutorial: tabsatz.

There is another nice tutorial set at http://www.tug.org/tutorials/tugindia/

See also Robin Fairbairns' FAQ:  http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq; there is an
entire section on table construction.

Cheers,  Phil Ratcliffe

P.S.  Googling -tables in latex line thickness- got me
www.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/booktabs/booktabs.pdf as the
second entry.