org-mode figures always centered

Question

As of now, org-mode always adds a \centering into the Latex export for figures. This makes my figures appear centered. But I want them to be alligned to the left. For tables, some suggested using :center nil. But there is no such thing for figures. Someone else suggested modifying an elisp variable but I looked and there is no such variable. If I add :float nil then \centering is removed but this ignores captions as well. So how can I make Latex export not add \centering before \includegraphics by default? I want to retain captions.

If I manually edit resulting tex file and remove \centering, I get my images as intended. But this time caption stays centered, only the image moves.

Answer 1

In org-mode 8.3 or later, this is controlled by the variable org-latex-images-centered:

When non-nil, images are centered.

The default is t; you want to set it to nil. This can be done either by setting it globally in your Emacs config: (setq org-latex-images-centered nil) or by using a BIND option in each org file where you want this setting:

#+BIND: org-latex-images-centered nil

In the latter case you have to set org-export-allow-bind-keywords to t in your Emacs config to allow the BIND keyword to do anything.

To set this per figure (or table) you can set latex attributes. Adding

#+ATTR_LATEX: :center nil

will suppress the centering for that float only.

For tables there is a corresponding variable org-latex-tables-centered that behaves the same way.

Personally I recommend the BIND version as it makes the document more portable and reproducible, especially if you have co-authors.