#Tableflip fling code#

It’s easy to lose track of which column you’re working on because the contents of the table cells have different lengths and the pipe characters don’t line up with each other.

#Tableflip fling code#

When processed, the code above turns into a nice HTML table, like this: Column 1Īs you can see, the Markdown code for a table can be messy. The leading and trailing pipe characters are optional, but I prefer to include them. Here’s an example: | Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | The syntax uses a set of pipe (|) characters to separate the columns and a row of dashes with optional colons to separate the header from body of the table and to set the alignment of the columns. It was popularized by Fletcher Penney in his MultiMarkdown processor, although I believe it was Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra that was the first to include it. What I, and most people, call the “Markdown table” syntax is a common extension to the basic Gruber syntax.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a “Markdown table,” because John Gruber never implemented a table syntax. Bottom line: in its present state, it’s not ready for me, but I can see where other people would find it quite useful. I was a little busy earlier in the month, but I’ve had a chance to give TableFlip a workout over the past week. Longtime readers of this blog will know that my interest in making it easy to edit and cleanly display Markdown tables goes way back, so I was eager to give TableFlip a try. It’s a spreadsheet-like editor that works with Markdown tables, and it got favorable reviews from folks like Brett Terpstra, Katie Floyd, Eddie Smith, and John Voorhees. A few weeks ago, a new Mac app called TableFlip was released.