How to Make Beautiful Tables with booktabs (No Vertical Lines)
Most academic journals and style guides discourage vertical lines in tables. The booktabs package provides \toprule, \midrule, and \bottomrule commands that produce clean, professional-looking horizontal rules with proper spacing. Switching from gridded tables to booktabs-style tables is one of the easiest ways to make your paper look more polished. Bibby AI includes booktabs in all its templates by default, giving you beautiful tables from the start.
Convert a Basic Table to booktabs Style
Remove all vertical lines (|) from the column specification and replace \hline with booktabs commands. Compare the before and after:
\usepackage{booktabs}
% BEFORE: Traditional gridded table
% \begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|}
% \hline
% \textbf{Method} & \textbf{Acc.} & \textbf{F1} \\
% \hline
% Baseline & 0.82 & 0.79 \\
% \hline
% Proposed & 0.91 & 0.89 \\
% \hline
% \end{tabular}
% AFTER: Clean booktabs table
\begin{table}[htbp]
\centering
\caption{Model Performance Comparison}
\label{tab:performance}
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
\toprule
\textbf{Method} & \textbf{Accuracy} & \textbf{F1 Score} \\
\midrule
Baseline & 0.82 & 0.79 \\
SVM & 0.86 & 0.83 \\
Random Forest & 0.88 & 0.85 \\
\textbf{Proposed} & \textbf{0.91} & \textbf{0.89} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}Add Sub-Headers with cmidrule
Use \cmidrule{start-end} to create partial horizontal rules that visually group columns. Add (lr) for trimmed ends that don't touch adjacent rules:
\usepackage{booktabs}
\begin{table}[htbp]
\centering
\caption{Results on Multiple Datasets}
\label{tab:datasets}
\begin{tabular}{l cc cc}
\toprule
& \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{MNIST}} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{CIFAR-10}} \\
\cmidrule(lr){2-3} \cmidrule(lr){4-5}
\textbf{Model} & Acc. & F1 & Acc. & F1 \\
\midrule
CNN & 99.1 & 99.0 & 91.2 & 90.8 \\
ResNet-18 & 99.4 & 99.3 & 93.5 & 93.1 \\
ViT-Small & 99.3 & 99.2 & 95.1 & 94.8 \\
\midrule
\textit{Average} & 99.3 & 99.2 & 93.3 & 92.9 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}Combine booktabs with siunitx for Aligned Numbers
Use the siunitx package's S column type to align numbers on the decimal point, producing truly professional data tables:
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{siunitx}
\begin{table}[htbp]
\centering
\caption{Ablation Study Results}
\label{tab:ablation}
\begin{tabular}{l S[table-format=2.1] S[table-format=2.1] S[table-format=1.2]}
\toprule
\textbf{Configuration} & {\textbf{BLEU}} & {\textbf{ROUGE-L}} & {\textbf{Time (h)}} \\
\midrule
Full model & 42.3 & 71.8 & 3.21 \\
-- Attention & 38.1 & 67.2 & 2.85 \\
-- Dropout & 40.7 & 69.5 & 3.18 \\
-- Data augmentation & 35.9 & 63.4 & 3.05 \\
-- Pre-training & 29.4 & 55.1 & 1.42 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}💡 Tips
- •Never use \hline or \cline with booktabs — always use \toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule, and \cmidrule.
- •Use \cmidrule(lr){2-3} with the (lr) trim option to add small gaps between adjacent partial rules.
- •Bold the best result in each column to draw readers' attention — it's a common convention in ML papers.
- •Most top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ACL, IEEE) prefer booktabs-style tables — Bibby AI templates follow these conventions.
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