%% 
%%  A DANTE-Edition example
%% 
%%  Example 02-18-1 on page 87.
%% 
%%  Copyright (C) 2010 Herbert Voss
%% 
%%  It may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions
%%  of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3
%%  of this license or (at your option) any later version.
%% 
%%  See http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt for details.
%% 
%% 
%% ==== 
% Show page(s) 1
%% 
\documentclass[]{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength\textwidth{177.70511pt}
\setlength\parindent{0pt}
\AtBeginDocument{\sloppy}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\setlength\textwidth{6cm}
\setlength\parskip{8pt plus 3pt}
\AtBeginDocument{\small}

\usepackage{tabularx}

\begin{document}
Text before the table, which spans the whole line to
show that the table is that wide as well.\par
\begin{tabularx}{\linewidth}{!{\vrule width 2pt}X|}
A bar next to the text can be created easily now.
\par\medskip It can also span several paragraphs,
but page breaks are not possible with
\texttt{tabularx} (see \texttt{ltxtable} package).
\end{tabularx}\par
Text after the table, which spans the whole line to
show that the table is that wide as well.
\end{document}
