As the examples so far have explained, setting hitch or squeeze to 1 suppresses page breaks but does not do anything with the table texts themselves. You will often find that you can improve the appearance of the printed page by suppressing some or all of the titles for the second and subsequent tables. As an illustration of what can be achieved, consider the following table that was created by the specification:

The table that this spec creates is shown below.

You can improve this table by controlling the table titles, footnotes and bottom text. The way to do this is to use squeeze=2.

If you create these tables with squeeze=2, Quantum still prints the first page of the second table on the same page as the previous table but it also:

The previous figure shows that Quantum still prints the page numbers as they would appear on separate pages. You can further improve the table’s appearance by either suppressing page numbers (by placing nopage on the a statement), or by specifying that the pages should be numbered physically and not logically (by placing physpag on the a statement). For more information on physpag, see Logical and physical page numbers.

The effect of joining the two tables in the previous example using squeeze=2 is shown below.

Now that you have seen what can be achieved, you might be interested to know more about how Quantum decides whether to suppress titles, in case you have tables in which you expected Quantum to suppress text and it did not.

When it compares titles on tables, Quantum generally looks at blocks of titles rather than individual lines. When comparing the footnotes of the two tables, Quantum compares all the tt texts for the first table with all the tts for the second and suppresses the footnote for the second table only if the two blocks are identical. If the two footnotes have the same first line but different second lines, Quantum sees the blocks as different and prints each footnote in full below the table to which it belongs.

When Quantum compares titles at the top of the table it again looks at the titles as a block, only this time it suppresses titles on the second table as long as they are identical to the corresponding title lines for the first table. In the tables shown here, the job title, the output type description, and the first title line are identical for both tables so Quantum prints them at the top of the first table only.

When comparing table titles, Quantum also considers table numbers, page numbers, and output type descriptions. In some circumstances, this could prevent Quantum from suppressing otherwise-identical table titles. In the example, Quantum has numbered the first table as Page 1 and the second table as Page 2. In this case, Quantum sees the different page numbers, stops comparing the title texts and repeats the table titles at the top of the second table. The same happens if you have table numbering set.

There are two ways you can get around this: