How do I use a tab as the delimiter?

Type the two characters backslash-t in the delimiter box. The tool treats that as a real tab character when splitting your rows.

Why does the output need a monospace font?

Column alignment is done by padding fields with spaces, which only lines up visually when every character has the same width. The output box uses a monospace font for that reason.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The formatting runs locally in your browser and your text never leaves your device.

What is the difference between left and right alignment?

Left alignment pads spaces after each value so text starts flush left; right alignment pads before each value so numbers line up by their last digit, which is best for figures and currency.

How is each column's width decided?

The tool scans every row and sets each column's width to the longest value in that column, then pads shorter values to match. Trailing whitespace on the last column is trimmed.

What if some rows have more fields than others?

It uses the maximum field count found across all rows. Rows with fewer fields are treated as having empty trailing cells, so the columns still line up.

Does it work for code comments or README tables?

Yes. It is ideal for tidying ASCII tables in README files, aligning trailing code comments, or cleaning up terminal output before pasting it elsewhere.

What is the Text Column Formatter?

Free text column formatter — turn delimited rows into neatly aligned monospace columns with configurable delimiter, alignment, and gap. Runs entirely in your browser, nothing is uploaded. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Text Column Formatter

Name: Text Column Formatter
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Align text into clean columns

The text column formatter takes delimited rows — separated by a pipe, comma, semicolon, or tab — and pads each field so the columns line up perfectly in a monospace layout. It is handy for tidying ASCII tables in README files, aligning trailing code comments, cleaning up terminal output before pasting into a report, or preparing tabular data to paste into a plain-text email.

How the alignment works

The tool splits every line on your chosen delimiter and trims each field. It then scans every row to find the longest value in each column position and sets that as the column’s width. Each value is padded with spaces to that width — spaces appended for left alignment, spaces prepended for right alignment — and columns are joined with your chosen gap (minimum one space). Trailing spaces on each output line are stripped.

Because the alignment depends on every character occupying the same horizontal width, the output is displayed in a monospace font. Copying into a proportional font (like most word processors use) will break the alignment.

Example

With the delimiter |, left alignment and a 2-space gap, this input:

Name | Role | City
Ada | Engineer | London
Lin | Designer | Berlin
Sam | Analyst | Tokyo

becomes:

Name  Role      City
Ada   Engineer  London
Lin   Designer  Berlin
Sam   Analyst   Tokyo

Engineer is the longest value in the second column (8 characters), so all other values in that column are padded to 8. The header Role gets 4 spaces after it to match.

Practical uses and tips

README tables. Markdown renderers ignore extra spaces in plain paragraphs, but code blocks and README headers often benefit from aligned columns for visual scanning. Paste your pipe-delimited draft, format it here, then paste the result back.

Aligned code comments. Many style guides prefer trailing comments to line up across a block. Paste your variable declarations as name | comment, format with right alignment, then remove the delimiter — the comments land at a consistent column.

Right-align numbers. Switching to right alignment is particularly useful for columns of figures: currency amounts, counts, or percentages line up by their last digit, which makes comparisons much easier at a glance.

Mixed-length rows. If some rows have more fields than others, the tool treats shorter rows as having empty trailing cells so all columns still align consistently.

Everything runs in your browser — your text is never uploaded.