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Some care must be taken with grid tables to avoid undesired interactions with cell text in rare cases. For example, the following table contains a cell in row 2 spanning from column 2 to column 4:

If a vertical bar is used in the text of that cell, it could have unintended effects if accidentally aligned with column boundaries:

Several solutions are possible. All that is needed is to break the continuity of the cell outline rectangle. One possibility is to shift the text by adding an extra space before:

Another possibility is to add an extra line to row 2:

Simple Tables

Simple tables provide a compact and easy to type but limited row-oriented table representation for simple data sets. Cell contents are typically single paragraphs, although arbitrary body elements may be represented in most cells. Simple tables allow multi-line rows (in all but the first column) and column spans, but not row spans. See Grid Tables above for a complete table representation.

Simple tables are described with horizontal borders made up of "=" and "-" characters. The equals sign ("=") is used for top and bottom table borders, and to separate optional header rows from the table body. The hyphen ("-") is used to indicate column spans in a single row by underlining the joined columns, and may optionally be used to explicitly and/or visually separate rows.

A simple table begins with a top border of equals signs with one or more spaces at each column boundary (two or more spaces recommended). Regardless of spans, the top border must fully describe all table columns. There must be at least two columns in the table (to differentiate it from section headers). The last of the optional header rows is underlined with '=', again with spaces at column boundaries. There may not be a blank line below the header row separator; it would be interpreted as the bottom border of the table. The bottom boundary of the table consists of '=' underlines, also with spaces at column boundaries. For example, here is a truth table, a three-column table with one header row and four body rows:

Underlines of '-' may be used to indicate column spans by "filling in" column margins to join adjacent columns. Column span underlines must be complete (they must cover all columns) and align with established column boundaries. Text lines containing column span underlines may not contain any other text. A column span underline applies only to one row immediately above it. For example, here is a table with a column span in the header:

Each line of text must contain spaces at column boundaries, except where cells have been joined by column spans. Each line of text starts a new row, except when there is a blank cell in the first column. In that case, that line of text is parsed as a continuation line. For this reason, cells in the first column of new rows (not continuation lines) must contain some text; blank cells would lead to a misinterpretation. An empty comment ("..") is sufficient and will be omitted from the processed output (see Comments below). Also, this mechanism limits cells in the first column to only one line of text. Use grid tables if this limitation is unacceptable.

Underlines of '-' may also be used to visually separate rows, even if there are no column spans. This is especially useful in long tables, where rows are many lines long.

Blank lines are permitted within simple tables. Their interpretation depends on the context. Blank lines between rows are ignored. Blank lines within multi-line rows may separate paragraphs or other body elements within cells.

The rightmost column is unbounded; text may continue past the edge of the table (as indicated by the table borders). However, it is recommended that borders be made long enough to contain the entire text.

The following example illustrates continuation lines (row 2 consists of two lines of text, and four lines for row 3), a blank line separating paragraphs (row 3, column 2), and text extending past the right edge of the table:

Explicit Markup Blocks