[Python] Having trouble in posit great_tables formatting with whitespace sensitive text ,...

I am using the great_tables python library from Posit and am trying to format some long text for a particular column in a html table derived from a pandas DataFrame inside a Jupyter Notebook .

The text represents a Protein Sequence alignment and these are best showed with a fixed width font and with column width larger than the length of the alignment , so the matched sequences, often in upper and lower case and other symbols lie on top of each other.

However I cannot get great_tables to format the sequences correctly in the output. I am wondering how to control the way whitespace or the col_width is assigned, because it seems to be overridden

The output format ideally lays out a string with the alignment information within a great_tables cell:

..........Right_justfied_ID : ABCDEFG-LONG-SEQUENCE-OF-AMINO-ACIDS
............................. abcdefg-long-sequence-of-information
...............second_ID_NUM: AACDeFF-LONG-SEQUENCE-NUMBER-2-ofAAS
............................: Additional annotation information---



I am currently formatting the string in python within the cell, but when they are rendered in the table , despite using a fixed width font. The final text seems to ignore whitespace and messes up the layout within the cell.


def create_dummy_dataframe_mkdown(num_elements = 100):
pat_id = []
seq_top = create_random_aa_seq(150)
seq_bot = []
ali = []
for i in range(num_elements):
pat_id.append(create_dummy_pat_ids())
seq_bottom_new = mutate_sequence_randomly(seq_top)
seq_bot.append(seq_bottom_new)
ali.append(write_alignment_string_mkdown(seq_top, seq_bottom_new))
data ={"pat_id": pat_id, "seq_bot":seq_bot , "Alignment": ali}
return pandas.DataFrame(data)

# Create DataFrame with alignment

df_mkdown = create_dummy_dataframe()

# Now creating the great_tables
gt_mkdown = GT(df_mkdown)
gt_mkdown.cols_width(cases={"Alignment":"3000px"}).fmt_markdown(columns="Alignment")


No matter what I try , the markdown table or the cols_width overrules the white space. I even tried not using markdown and still the whitespace still required to make everything align was not included in the cell. Please can you help me troubleshoot. A more suitable working example is at this gist: https://gist.github.com/harijay/177caf12d312b22a93a540a08c03713f

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