Align font size for tables with different number of columns

Question

I am fairly new to LaTeX and I have a quite basic question. I create tables like this:

\begin{table}[H]
    \resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
        \begin{tabular}{@{\extracolsep{5pt}}lD{.}{.}{-2} D{.}{.}{-2} D{.}{.}{-2} }
            Test & 1 & 2 & 3
\end{tabular}}
\end{table} 

However, I have a lot of tables and their number of columns differs. Accordingly, the font size changes automatically to my marginal settings (\resizebox{\textwidth}), i.e. the more columns the table has the smaller the font size. Is there a way to align the font size of all tables at once?

I know that I can decrease the font size manually by increasing the number within \extracolsep{5pt} to e.g.

\extracolsep{10pt}

However, I don't want to do this for every table and compare the results until they roughly coincide.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Never scale tables, as you see, scaling just produces inconsistent font sizes.

Simply use

\begin{table}[htbp]
     \small
        \begin{tabular}{lD{.}{.}{-2} D{.}{.}{-2} D{.}{.}{-2} }
            Test & 1 & 2 & 3
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

or if \small is still too large \footnotsize.

Note that \extracolsep does nothing in tabular (it is used to give stretch space for tabular* to achieve the target width of the table). I also removed [H] which should be used very sparingly as it disables the float positioning algorithm (and specifying that the table may float is the sole purpose of the table environment).