Summary

gog docs exposes no way to apply visual formatting to specific table cells. The underlying Google Docs API does expose this via updateTableCellStyle (for cell-level properties like backgroundColor) and updateTextStyle (for inline run properties like bold). A wrapper would round out the doc-shaping surface alongside --page-width, --margin-*, table column-widths (#631), etc.

Use case

Tag-style badges in header tables of structured documents. For example: a header table where one row names a category and the value cell should carry a stable, consistent colour per category (pale background + bold text) so a reader can scan and immediately see which slice of the org a doc belongs to. Today this requires hand-styling via Drive UI on every doc — a per-doc tax that scales badly.

Proposed surface

gog docs cell-style <docId> \
  --tab <title-or-id> \
  --table-index N            # 0-based ordinal among tables in the tab
  --row R --col C            # 0-based cell coordinate
  --background-color <#hex>  # optional; maps to tableCellStyle.backgroundColor
  --bold                     # optional; applies updateTextStyle bold=true to cell contents
  --italic --underline       # optional; same shape
  --text-color <#hex>        # optional; maps to textStyle.foregroundColor

A range form would be nice for badge bars: --row 0 --col 0:3 styles three adjacent cells.

Underlying API

• documents.batchUpdate → updateTableCellStyle with tableCellStyle.backgroundColor.color.rgbColor and tableRange / tableCellLocation
• documents.batchUpdate → updateTextStyle with textStyle.bold / .italic / .underline / .foregroundColor and a content range spanning the cell

Workaround today

Drive UI styling (manual, doesn't survive find-replace round-trips). No CLI path.

Related

• Feature: table column-width control (FIXED_WIDTH per column, or evenly distributed) #631 (table column widths) — same theme: table styling primitives exposed via flags rather than markdown.
• feat(docs): add insert-table primitive — direct table insertion without the markdown path #602 (table insertion primitive) — direct-API path bypassing markdown.