How to horizontally center a table? align="CENTER" is not working for me

[Lucas-C]

Discussed in #1304

^{Originally posted by DerekRobin November 19, 2024}
I was wondering how to horizontally center a table on the page? I know about the align parameter that can be passed when instantiating a table. However, for some reason passing align="CENTER" does not align the table to the center of the page.

I have included the code I am using to generate the table below from a pandas dataframe (df)

df = df.applymap(str)
COLUMNS = [list(df)]  
ROWS = df.values.tolist()  
DATA = COLUMNS + ROWS
with self.table(
    borders_layout="NONE",
    headings_style=FontFace(emphasis="BOLD", color="#000000", fill_color="#ececec"),
    cell_fill_color="#ffffff",
    cell_fill_mode="EVEN_ROWS",
    line_height=self.font_size * 1.5,
    text_align=(
        "LEFT",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
        "CENTER",
    ),
    col_widths=(190, 70, 70, 70, 70, 70, 70, 70),
    align="CENTER"
) as table:
    for i, data_row in enumerate(DATA):
        # some entries of data_row are conditionally modified here
        # in order to ensure the table has the correct data
        # the code within this function does not interface with any FPDF code
        data_row = modify_data_row()
       
        if i == 0:
            table.row(data_row)
        else:
            table.row(data_row, style=FontFace(color=color, fill_color=fill_color))
```</div>

[Lucas-C]

Hi @DerekRobin

Thank you for the report.

Despite being mentioned in our documentation: https://py-pdf.github.io/fpdf2/Tables.html#setting-table-column-widths

align can be passed to table() to set the table horizontal position relative to the page, when it's not using the full page width. It's centered by default.

...it seems that this never worked properly... 😅

I tested the following code with fpdf2 version 2.7.0, where tables were originally introduced in this documentation was redacted:

from fpdf import FPDF

TABLE_DATA = (
    ("First name", "Last name", "Age", "City"),
    ("Jules", "Smith", "34", "San Juan"),
    ("Mary", "Ramos", "45", "Orlando"),
    ("Carlson", "Banks", "19", "Los Angeles"),
    ("Lucas", "Cimon", "31", "Angers"),
)

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.set_font("Times", size=16)
with pdf.table(col_widths=pdf.epw / 5, align="C") as table:
    for data_row in TABLE_DATA:
        row = table.row()
        for datum in data_row:
            row.cell(datum)
pdf.output("./test/table/table_with_fixed_col_width_and_align.pdf")

...and the table is NOT horizontally centered on the page!

Wooops.

I will look into fix it.

[Lucas-C]

@allcontributors please add @DerekRobin for bug report

[allcontributors]

@Lucas-C

I've put up a pull request to add @DerekRobin! 🎉

[Lucas-C]

Fixed in PR #1308

[Lucas-C]

@DerekRobin: while the fix has not been released in a new version published on Pypi, you can test that it works for you using:

pip install git+https://github.com/py-pdf/fpdf2.git@master

Also, note that you will have to either specify a fixed column width (single number col_widths in the document unit) or a table width= in order for the table to not fill the page width.

When col_widths is provided as an array, those values are not considered to be widths in the document unit but as "fractions" (meaning that col_widths=(1, 1, 2) is strictly equivalent to col_widths=(25, 25, 50))

[DerekRobin]

What wonderful news to wake up to! Thank you so much :)