I have a table that takes up a full page, but I want it to start on a page that already has some text and then continue onto the next page (i.e. it's ok if the table gets broken up and spans two pages). It is a simple two column table:
\begin{table}[h] \centering \begin{tabular}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline ... \end{tabular} \end{table} I guess I need longtable? How do I use it?
There are a few options described in How can I make a table that takes up more than a single page?
I've put a MWE below using the longtable package; I deliberately didn't put the longtable in the table environment so that it wouldn't float, and would show that it breaks across pages.
As described in @Werner's comment, the documentation has a lot of detail.
\documentclass{article} \usepackage{longtable} \usepackage{lipsum} % just for dummy text- not needed for a longtable \begin{document} \lipsum[1] \lipsum[1] \lipsum[1] %\begin{table}[h] %\centering \begin{longtable}{| p{.20\textwidth} | p{.80\textwidth} |} \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline foo & bar \\ \hline \caption{Your caption here} % needs to go inside longtable environment \label{tab:myfirstlongtable} \end{longtable} %\end{table} Table \ref{tab:myfirstlongtable} shows my first longtable. \end{document} As a side note, some folks would advocate against using vertical lines in a table- that's a separate discussion though :) Have a look at Why not use vertical lines ('|') in a tabular?
\small just after \begin{longtable} \begin{longtable}[H]{|m{0.2\linewidth}|m{0.35\linewidth}|m{0.15\linewidth}|m{0.3\linewidth}|} \hline \textbf{1} & \textbf{2} & \textbf{3} & \textbf{4}\\\hline \endfirsthead \hline \textbf{1} & \textbf{2} & \textbf{3} & \textbf{4}\\\hline \endhead Content ... \end{longtable} You may try longtblr environment of tabularray package. It has X column and can be used in two column documents.
\documentclass{article} \usepackage[a6paper,margin=15mm]{geometry} \usepackage{tabularray} \usepackage{xcolor} \begin{document} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. \begin{longtblr}[ caption = {Long Title}, label = {tab:test}, ]{ colspec = {|XX[4]|}, rowhead = 1, hlines, row{even} = {gray9}, row{1} = {olive9}, } Head & Head \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ foo & bar \\ \end{longtblr} The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. \end{document} 
longtablepackage documentation is available on CTAN. It includes one very detailed example.tabular->longtablewill do the trick. They have perfect comformance afaict.