There is a really neat trick of having a custom table stored
ready for use. Rick Stones
tips
& tricks file describes how to do this. This would get
around the padding issue. For the alignment you can handle this by
a style in your style sheet.
Failing this, create a table exactly the way you want, copy
the truecode to a Notepad file and save it to your desktop. Then
everytime you want to create a table, just copy/paste the code into
the truecode.