Add a configurable Switch/Flag to disable auto-padding of table-cells

[SpocWeb]

Hi, thank you very much for supporting WYSIWYG-Tables natively.
But your latest adjustment of auto-padding table-cells to the same width
was a breaking change and creates friction, not only with me.

Auto-format tables (add padding to cells) for easy plain-text reading

will be implemented in v1.5.4. No ETAs.

Please as a switch so that we can disable that. That should not be much of an effort.

Problems:

• modifies all Rows, creating churn in versioning Systems
• breaks Plugin Table-Extended GitHub - aidenlx/table-extended: Extend basic table in Obsidian with MultiMarkdown table syntax
  • this Plugin is the only one left with ColSpan / RowSpan Rendering
  • alternatively support ColSpan / RowSpan directly

[allroundninja]

+1.

It’s a good feature to have, but it’s not suitable for all users.

• The additional auto-generated characters make the source mode view take up unnecessary screen estate for those who appreciate a minimal view. This can be particularly bothersome when a cell contains one long line or multiple lines.
• Auto-cleanup with a regex search and replace is a bit tedious and perhaps tricky in certain cases.
• An increase in file size may be disliked, even though the impact is minimal. One could argue this has an unnecessary impact on those who do not benefit from auto-padding when only using the live view editor.

[prozor]

+1

I switch to the native editor (mine is vim) when editing tables as it is much quicker and the padding makes editing more difficult.

I will often run a script to clean up the padding before editing - that is obviously not very effective.

[alex_az]

+1

I’d really like an option for minimal or more human-readable markdown for tables. I work with a lot of markdown files from Obsidian using LLMs, and while Obsidian’s table markdown looks nice, it uses up so many characters. Right now, I use a Python script to create minimised versions of the markdown files. Since I use live preview in Obsidian, making the table markdown look pretty isn’t important to me.

Thanks.

[benyip]

Auto-padding works badly for CJK text. It treats CJK characters as the same width as Latin characters.

[Janlo]

+1

I would also really like this feature. I use pandoc regularly to compile PDFs from my notes, and pandoc calculates the width of a column from the number of dashes. This looks very weird if you have cells where the text is wrapped in the generated PDF or in reading mode but on one line in the source mode.

Tables

[ar-siddiqui]

Please see this

Plugin to remove autopadding in tables

Hello, Obsidian auto-pads Markdown table cells with spaces when you edit a different row. That makes git diff noisy and harder to review. This has been an issue for many people as discussed here . I asked AI to create a plugin that removes the extra padding on save to keep diffs clean. Sharing it here in case other people need it. I don’t plan to publish it to the Obsidian repo, neither I have extensively tested it. I hope in future this setting is available in Obsidian core.