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raincole • yesterday at 4:17 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

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.

Replies

trollbridge • yesterday at 4:21 AM

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

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mcny • yesterday at 7:01 AM

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?
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