Tagapalooza: {tables} and {horizontal-align}

Question

tables wiki reads at the moment:

tables is about the tabular environment and related packages such as array, booktabs, tabularx and longtable. For questions about the table environment (i.e., about floating or positioning), use floats instead.

There are many packages that extend the basic functionality of the tabular environment. A good overview of packages (and package conflicts) can be found in Which tabular packages do which tasks and which packages conflict?.

If your question involves one of these specific packages (or another tabular package not listed), you should add a tag for that package as well as the tables tag.

So a LaTeX-specific wiki as it stands. All of the above relate to horizontal alignment. I think I've always tagged \halign questions with horizontal-alignment, and so was wondering what purpose does the tables tag represent since it outrules table (for floats), and isn't specifically about tabular (since its name is tables and not tabular). On the one hand, \halign questions could be in tables just as well as tables could be horizontal-alignment. It should be noted that tabular uses \halign internally, and \halign comes from “horizontal alignment”.

To me it would seem logical if tables was a synonym for horizontal-alignment, and for actual tabular questions there would be a tag tabular.

What do you think?

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Speaking of horizontal-alignment, I find the current wiki rather confusing:

horizontal-alignment is about aligning document elements horizontally, e.g. typesetting paragraphs using \centering or \raggedright or adjusting the horizontal position of several equation or table components. If your question is generally about (horizontal) white space, use spacing instead.

, because, as I understand, neither \centering, nor \raggedright actually align anything.

Maybe those two could fit into a tag like paragraph-shape or similar?

Answer 1

tables isn't called tabular because it also covers questions about similar environments like tabularx and tabulary. The tag is about aligning table elements, but also about spacing, adding captions and rules, dealing with multi-column and multi-row areas etc.

\raggedright is about aligning paragraphs to the left margin of the text block. An alternative name for horizontal-alignment would have been "justification", but the former name corresponds to vertical-alignment (which is, e.g., about \raggedbottom).