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

Sadly I don't think rst offers that ability... the table styling options are rather limited. That said, if you're rendering to HTML, you could add a custom stylesheet with a css rule such as:

table.right-align-right-col td:last-child {
    text-align: right
}

and then add the directive:

.. rst-class:: right-align-right-col

right above your table in the rst file. It's clunky, but it should work.

---

update 2013-2-6: I've since needed to accomplish this myself, and came up with a more permanent solution. The cloud_sptheme.ext.table_styling Sphinx extension adds directives for doing column alignment, per-column css classes, and number of other table styling tricks. Despite being packaged as part of the "cloud" Sphinx theme, it should work with any Sphinx theme.

Answer 2

While it appears that ReST doesn't actually support cell content alignment, you can actually use line-blocks within your cell to enforce preservation of whitespace to effectively pad your cell's content.

You'll have to use some of the unicode-whitespace characters (e.g. U+2001 - EM QUAD) and have them preceded by a normal space character (U+0020) i.e. U+0020U+2001Your String to stop the ReST parser complaining about malformed tables and unterminated substitution references, etc.

+--------+---------+
| String | Num     |
+========+=========+
| foo    ||   12.00|   # second cell's content is actually |<U+0020><U+2001>12.00
+--------+---------+
| bar    ||    3.01|
+--------+---------+
| baz    ||    4.99|
+--------+---------+
| moo    ||   15.99|
+--------+---------+
| quux   ||   33.49|
+--------+---------+
| foo    ||   20.00|
+--------+---------+
| bar    ||  100.00|
+--------+---------+

Tables like the above start to look a bit awkward and are awkward to maintain but the approach gets the job done. It also goes without saying, you'll need to both edit and generate UTF-8 output. While rst2html.py treats this well, I'm not sure how sphinx deals with this and if it can, whether the alignment remains when generating non-HTML documents.

Answer 3

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/