text formatting tool that can produce output like ls(1)?

[Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@realss.com>]

The output of "ls" is pretty good because:

1. It calculate column width from widest columns.
2. It knows one Chinese ideograph is two letters wide.
3. It aligns columns by flexible space character instead of tab
   

Is there a text formatting command that formats text like "ls" while take user supplied input?

If a command "unknown" can do this:
$ ls | "unknown"
should have the same output as
$ ls

--
P.S. this is indeed a re-post of previous of my post "expand (1) not useful enough. How about expandest?" but re-written with an example command that more people would be familiar with, a.k.a. ls, hoping to get more attention thus a result:)