On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 5:21 PM Ruy Exel <ruyexel@gmail.com> wrote:

The "Column width and alignment" feature of org-mode (http://orgmode.org/manual/Column-width-and-alignment.html) is not working in the latest GIT version (as of Fri Dec 8 20:06:59 BRST 2017).

I have just tested it in the table

|---+------------------------------|
|   | <6>                          |
| 1 | one                          |
| 2 | two                          |
| 3 | This is a long chunk of text |
| 4 | four                         |
|---+------------------------------|

which is actually the example given in the manual. It fails under the latest version (column width is unchanged upon alignment)

I am assuming you are using the master/development version of Org from git? If so, see this in ORG-NEWS:

*** =align= STARTUP value no longer narrow table columns

Columns narrowing (or shrinking) is now dynamic. See [[*Dynamically
narrow table columns]] for details. In particular, it is decoupled from
aligning.

If you need to automatically shrink columns upon opening an Org
document, use =shrink= value instead, or in addition to align:

#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
,#+STARTUP: align shrink
#+END_EXAMPLE

but it works OK in an older version (Org version 7.9.3f - GNU Emacs 24.3).

Wow! That's a very old version!

As you are making this big version upgrade, it would be worthwhile to go through the whole of http://orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org-mode.git/tree/etc/ORG-NEWS and make a note of new features and few breaking changes since that version.