How to right-align columns content in reStructuredText simple tables?

Question

I\'m editing the documentation for a project of mine using Sphinx, which in turn uses reStructuredText as markup language.

I have a simple table (as opposed to

Answer 1

My approach is a bit of sed on the TeX file generated by Docutils. The idea is to replace the table declaration with something that fits your needs.

Docutils produce something like that :

\begin{longtable*}[c]{p{0.086\DUtablewidth}p{0.290\DUtablewidth}}

Imagine you want to right-align the second column.You may want to replace this with :

\begin{longtable*}[c]{lr}

But you lose the ability to control the width of the cells. What we need here is to declare 2 \newcolumntype, one for the right-align (x) and one for the left-align (y):

\newcolumntype{x}[1]{% 
>{\raggedleft\hspace{0pt}}p{#1}}% 
\newcolumntype{y}[1]{% 
>{\raggedright\hspace{0pt}}p{#1}}% 

And use them in the table declaration:

\begin{longtable*}[c]{y{7.5cm}x{2cm}}

The \\ newline must also be replaced with a \tabularnewline.

I put everything in a script file because I am on OSX and the version of sed shipped does not support newline substitution with \n (that sucks when you are in a Makefile).

The bottom-line

On OSX/BSD:

sed -E -f fix_table.sed < source.tex > destination.tex

with fix_table.sed:

s/\\begin{longtable\*}.*/\\newcolumntype{x}[1]{% \
>{\\raggedleft\\hspace{0pt}}p{#1}}% \
\\newcolumntype{y}[1]{% \
>{\\raggedright\\hspace{0pt}}p{#1}}% \
\\begin{longtable*}[c]{y{7.5cm}x{2cm}}/
s/\\\\/\\tabularnewline/

This is a bit harsh but there is no workaround that really works at the RestructuredText level.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables

http://texblog.org/2008/05/07/fwd-equal-cell-width-right-and-centre-aligned-content/