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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Your demo doesn't show any cell padding. Is this the case for the final product? If so, is that something you're working on?

I'm not a huge fan of tables in markdown but if they're necessary then it should at least be readable in clear text and without padding it's not.

eg with padding:

    | which | column | is  | the | value | foo | in | ? |
    |-------|--------|-----|-----|-------|-----|----|---|
    |       |        | foo |     |       |     |    |   |

vs without padding

    | which | column | is | the | value | foo | in | ? |
    |-------|--------|-----|-----|-------|-----|----|---|
    |  |  | foo |  |  |  |  |  |

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I have thought about this. Padding works when the text in a cell is not too long. When cell texts are arbitrary long, "padding" doesn't make sense any more.

Document Node is not just a pure Markdown editor, it has a beautiful HTML5 preview area, where you can see your tables in a perfect format. You can define your own styles using CSS, although we have 11 preview styles built-in.

Having said that, I think it's a good idea to give the users the option to enable padding. I will add that option in a later version.

There never be a final product for us and stop there, we will keep improving it and roll new versions frequently.

> I have thought about this. Padding works when the text in a cell is not too long. When cell texts are arbitrary long, "padding" doesn't make sense any more.

I do understand your point but you could also argue that's when you need padding the most because it becomes infinitely harder to visually parse the raw text.

I like your idea for giving people the option though.

> Document Node is not just a pure Markdown editor, it has a beautiful HTML5 preview area, where you can see your tables in a perfect format.

Document Node is a nicely polished product but it's worth remembering that the point of markdown is that it's still readable without needing a viewer that supports rich formatting. For example it should be just as readable in the terminal as it is in a HTML5 container (this is one of the reasons I don't really like tables in markdown but that ship has already sailed). Unfortunately not everyone will be using Document Node to view their markdown.

Thanks for your comment. It totally makes sense.

Sometimes, it is the art of balance. As a product, the goal is to save users time as much as possible. Eventually, the users have to decide whether it's appropriate to put a super complex table in Markdown, although it will be fine for tables with short rows.

While I'm writing this reply, I thought of how to improve this in Document Node. It can automatically check and add padding depending on whether any Markdown rows exceed 80 characters (or similar). One less thing to worry about.

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