I don't think tables are a good fit for markdown. I've worked with Pandoc and Asciidoc as well as most wiki variants like Creole and Mediawiki. Using text to describe a table structure horribly sucks. If you want people to make tables, allow the basic HTML needed for them to do it. I would really love to see a single unified implementation that could just become a part of popular languages. If you use Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl or whatever else you have in your toolbox, there's libraries to handle markdown with many behaving differently in subtle ways (like the gotchas you list). A simple testable implementation would encourage those languages to just natively support it, giving Markdown even more adoption. By the way, if you use Markdown for lots of stuff (leanpub, project documentation, etc) I really recommend seeking out and installing Markdownpad. It's like Notepad, but uses Markdown with a preview that can be easily customized by anyone that knows simple CSS. Just associate it with the '.md' file type and off you go. I think it prints nicely too, but I'm not sure, I haven't owned a printer in over a decade.