Org-mode: How to place a table left aligned on the paper?

Question

I'm very new to Latex or PDF-export. I try to export an Org-document with tables. The problem is, that I cannot (or better: don't know how to) place them left aligned. The problem seems to come from some default Latex command at the exported .tex:

\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{lll}
...
\end{tabular}
\end{center}

Does anyone know how to override this 'center'ing w/o any time editing the generated .tex?

Best regards, Chris.

Answer 1

If you want all tables to be always left-aligned, then setting org-latex-tables-centeredas @gigiair's answer suggests is the right way to go: you customize it once and never worry about it again.

If you want to change the centering behavior only for a single file, then the way to do it is to use the #+BIND mechanism. Add the following line to the top of your file:

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

That will set the local value of org-latex-tables-centered to nil during export only.

In order for this to work however, you will have to enable the BIND mechanism by setting (or customizing) the variable org-export-allow-bind-keywords to t. I find the BIND mechanism useful, so I set it permanently.

Finally, if you want to change the centering of a single table, you can set an attribute for that table only:

#+NAME: cubes
#+ATTR_LATEX: :center nil
|  a | a^{3} |
|----+-------|
|  1 |     1 |
|  2 |     8 |
...

Answer 2

You can eval

(setq org-latex-tables-centered nil)

or customize the variable org-latex-tables-centered

To customize the latex export, you can browse Org Export LaTeX

(customize-group "org-export-latex")