There are about forty different table environments for latex, all of
which do slightly different things, and none of them seem to do it all.
I found the "tabu" package recently, and thought "oh god another one",
but it seems to do it all: clever column alignment, longtable
functionality, all that good stuff.

Attached is a patch that lets you use the "tabu" and "longtabu" table
environments. Mostly the patch is necessary because tabu has its own
annoying syntax for table width declarations. Where everyone else does
something like:

\begin{tabular}{\textwidth}{cllr}

tabu does this:

\begin{tabu} to \textwidth {cllr}

Where you're allowed to use either "to" or "spread". Annoying, but in my
case still worth it. Since table plists can handle spaces, this works
with the attached patch:

#+ATTR_LATEX: :environment tabu :width to \textwidth :font \scriptsize :align rXrXrr

Actually I've just set `org-latex-default-table-environment' to tabu.

Dunno if this is worth it for other people, but there's the patch. If
access to the "spread" keyword isn't worth the trouble I can hard-code
"to": that would at least mean you could switch between table and tabu
without having to edit your ATTR_LATEX lines.

Yrs,
Eric