col­ortab – Shade cells of ta­bles and halign

The pack­age lets you shade or colour the cells in the align­ment en­vi­ron­ments such as \halign and LaTeX’s tab­u­lar and ar­ray en­vi­ron­ments.
The col­ortbl pack­age is to be pre­ferred to­day with LaTeX (it as­sures com­pat­i­bil­ity with the longtable pack­age, which is no longer true with col­ortab); an­other mod­ern op­tion is the ta­ble-colour­ing op­tion of the xcolor. How­ever, col­ortab re­mains an ad­e­quate so­lu­tion for use with Plain TeX.