Comment by raincole

1 day ago

It's fundamentally ok-ishly looking text.

I think that is the biggest reason why Markdown doesn't support table. There are alternatives that do (e.g. wikitext) but they didn't get as popular as Markdown. Why? Perhaps it's because that tables will never really look fine in pure text no matter how clever your syntax is.

11 comments

raincole

trollbridge 1 day ago

Provided you’ve got UTF-8 (or CP437/850/1521 etc) and fixed pitch, it’s easy to make tables.

Linux-Fan 19 hours ago

I don't think that is sufficient for the general case because I would like to be able to use the markdown like _emphasis_ or [hyperlinks](https://www.example.com) even inside the table rows and this doesn't render properly when using fixed pitch “tables as source code blocks”

mcny 1 day ago

Sorry but I don't understand

Isn't this a table?

    |sn|name|
    |--|--|
    |1|George|
    |2|John|

I feel like I've been doing this at least since about 2013?

Edit: I get it now. It was not a part of the original spec.

    |sn|name  |
    |--|------|
    | 1|George|
    | 2|John  |

It can look better if we use fixed width font and add padding I guess?

duskdozer 1 day ago
It can, the gripe that I don't have a good solution for is what happens when entry 3 is a 7-letter name?
- zdc1 1 day ago
  
  Then you need to re-pad everything (clean looking git diff be damned). It's just the reality of dealing with bounding boxes. Maybe we don't notice it in HTML and such since the browser redraws them for us for free.
  
  2 replies →
- huimang 16 hours ago
  
  With LSP and Marksman [0], those tables get formatted automatically on save for me.
  https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman
- eastbound 1 day ago
  
  IntelliJ repads the tables automatically when cells get bigger. I think you can even resize using the mouse!
- akshitgaur2005 1 day ago
  
  you switch to org!
- rconti 1 day ago
  
  Honestly, updating tables in markdown has been my most successful use of AI :)