I was just asking about this. I'm not sure I figured out the best way, but
it seems to work for me. I am exporting my tables to LaTeX primarily so I'm
not sure if this is what you're looking for or not...

Here's the recent series of messages:
http://osdir.com/ml/emacs-orgmode-gnu/2010-07/msg00068.html

The typical LaTeX table alignment is something like l|l|l for text which
means left aligned text with vertical dividers. Instead of l you can use
p{width} to specify a fixed column width which will wrap. In org, put this
in your file and export it to LaTeX PDF

#+ATTR_LaTeX: align= |l|l|
|row 1|test of some really really long text because I want to see if it will
wrap; what in the world will happen to it?|
|row 2|test of some not so long test|

#+ATTR_LaTeX: align= |l|p{10cm}|
|row 1|test of some really really long text because I want to see if it will
wrap; what in the world will happen to it?|
|row 2|test of some not so long test|

You can play with the 10cm value to figure out what you want to do. I
essentially use trial and error. I export, check the result, and leave every
'fine' column as the l (left) alignment and then target ones with longer
text to prevent them from going off the page. If you were looking for a more
'automatic' or 'intelligent' method, I'm not sure that it exists and not
sure anyone could agree on the rules it should follow anyway (should it wrap
a particular column? Just the longest one? Just the right-most one?).

Does this help?


John

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:25 PM, David Rogoff <david@therogoffs.com> wrote:

> I'm still learning org mode and have a question about table mode.  Is there
> a way to wrap text in a cell?  I search the docs I could find and the
> closest thing was putting <N> in a cell which forced that column to be N
> characters wide.  That sort-or works, but isn't great.  Am I missing
> something, or can org-mode not do this?
>
> Thanks,
>
>  David
>
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