If I make an astropy.table.Table and do table['somecolumn'].format = '%.2f', the various table printing methods work as expected: the column prints as a 2 sigfig floating point number. However, if I then do astropy.io.ascii.write(table,'somefile.dat'), the resulting ascii file does not respect the format specifier for the column.

I'm not actually sure if it's better to have it do so or not, but it's ambiguous whether it's supposed to or not, so this issue can be viewed as either a request to implement this (respecting format when using astropy.io.ascii.write on a table), or clarifying in the docs that this will not work the way one might expect.