textabletidy

is a (very) simple script to align the columns of a TeX table. I tried to make it as simple as possible while still being useful.

I wrote this while working on a book which contained several tables of statistics. These tables were generated automatically, but were difficult to read along with the rest of the LaTeX source because the columns weren't lined up. I took a quick look around, but didn't find anything that looked like a simple and easy solution.

Usage

If example.table.tex contains a TeX table,

cat example.table.tex | textabletidy

or

textabletidy example.table.tex

will both write the aligned table to STDOUT.

Example

example.table.tex contains

\begin{tabular}{
	r
	S[table-format=1.3]
	S[table-format=3.5e-1]
	S[table-format=1.4]
	S[table-format=-1.5]
}\toprule
Frankness & {$\aleph_0$} & {Widgets \& Bobbins} & {$\Delta_{\text{funk}}$} & {$r$}\\\midrule
Crows & 5.897 & 0.3692 & 0.4679 & -0.1367\\
Malaise & 5.128 & 1.692e-05 & 0.6395 & -0.06257\\
Lantern & 6.334 & 0.7099 & 0.57 & -0.1425\\
Rushing & 15.11 & 0.01569 & 0.3576 & 0.01739\\\midrule
Splinters & 3.753 & 1.084 & 0.2924 & -0.1632\\
Brilliant & 3.174 & 1.061e+04 & 0.2827 & -0.2533\\
Still & 3.192 & 1.795e+04 & 0.3066 & -0.1173\\
\midrule
Quickening & 2.93 & 250.6 & 0.999 & -0.02164\\
Barter & 3.437 & 6.625e-06 & 0.8351 & -0.6018\\
Promise & 9.753 & 16.03 & 0.5062 & 0.1852\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

This is hard to read. Piping it through textabletidy makes it easier to read:

\begin{tabular}{
	r
	S[table-format=1.3]
	S[table-format=3.5e-1]
	S[table-format=1.4]
	S[table-format=-1.5]
}\toprule
Frankness  & {$\aleph_0$} & {Widgets \& Bobbins} & {$\Delta_{\text{funk}}$} & {$r$}    \\ \midrule
Crows      & 5.897        & 0.3692               & 0.4679                   & -0.1367  \\ 
Malaise    & 5.128        & 1.692e-05            & 0.6395                   & -0.06257 \\ 
Lantern    & 6.334        & 0.7099               & 0.57                     & -0.1425  \\ 
Rushing    & 15.11        & 0.01569              & 0.3576                   & 0.01739  \\ \midrule
Splinters  & 3.753        & 1.084                & 0.2924                   & -0.1632  \\ 
Brilliant  & 3.174        & 1.061e+04            & 0.2827                   & -0.2533  \\ 
Still      & 3.192        & 1.795e+04            & 0.3066                   & -0.1173  \\ 
\midrule
Quickening & 2.93         & 250.6                & 0.999                    & -0.02164 \\ 
Barter     & 3.437        & 6.625e-06            & 0.8351                   & -0.6018  \\ 
Promise    & 9.753        & 16.03                & 0.5062                   & 0.1852   \\ 
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Notice that textabletidy doesn't do anything to lines that don't look like rows of the table, that it doesn't force things like horizontal rule commands to appear on their own line, and that it doesn't get confused by escaped ampersands.

Failure points

textabletidy chokes if a table row doesn't contain the same number of columns as the other rows. This occurs when using \multirow, for example.