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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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”

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?

It can, the gripe that I don't have a good solution for is what happens when entry 3 is a 7-letter name?

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.

A reasonable format would not insist you lay out tables visually any more than it would insist you center your headers if you'd like them horizontally centered when rendered. For instance, Asciidoctor has syntax for table cells that requires no whitespace and lets you put any content at all in a cell.

I'm not aware of any table-capable markdown renderer that requires tables to be padded correctly. It's purely a source-text-readability concern.

No doubt some janky one exists somewhere, but nobody uses that.

you switch to org!

IntelliJ repads the tables automatically when cells get bigger. I think you can even resize using the mouse!

Honestly, updating tables in markdown has been my most successful use of AI :)

With LSP and Marksman [0], those tables get formatted automatically on save for me.

https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman

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