30.13.5 Cell Justification

You can specify text justification for each cell. The justification is remembered independently for each cell and the subsequent editing of cell contents is subject to the specified justification.

The command table-justify requests the user to specify what to justify: a cell,a column, or a row. If you select cell justification, this command sets the justification only to the current cell. Selecting column or row justification set the justification to all the cells within a column or row respectively. The command then requests the user to enter which justification to apply: left, center, right, top, middle, bottom, or none. The options left, center, and right specify horizontal justification while the options top, middle, bottom, and none specify vertical justification. The vertical justification none effectively removes vertical justification while horizontal justification must be one of left, center, or right. Horizontal justification and vertical justification are specified independently.

Justification information is stored in the buffer as a part of text property. Therefore, this information is ephemeral and does not survive through the loss of the buffer (closing the buffer and revisiting the buffer erase any previous text properties). To countermand for this, the command table-recognize and other recognition commands (see Table Recognition) are equipped with a convenience feature (turned on by default). During table recognition, the contents of a cell are examined to determine which justification was originally applied to the cell and then applies this justification to the cell. This is a speculative algorithm and is therefore not perfect, however, the justification is deduced correctly most of the time. If you desire to disable this feature, customize the variable table-detect-cell-alignment to set it to nil.