Vertical Table Headings

[jayb]

Hey everyone,

In markdown, is it possible to have headings in tables vertical down the left-hand side of the table rather than horizontal across the top of the table?

I couldn’t find how to do this anywhere, so it may not be possible.

Cheers,

Jay

[scholarInTraining]

Hi Jay,
Could you explain a little more about what you want to use this table for? Do you just care about the appearance within Obsidian or do you need to export it elsewhere?
Does correct HTML tags for the header items matter (e.g. screenreaders being able to parse your table correctly)?

As far as the Markdown information pages I could find, tables (if they exist for a given Markdown spec) seem to have header rows, but not clear if those have to have content. Custom CSS #custom-css could presumably allow you to specify the formatting for any part of the table. And if you just wanted the first column bold you could do that directly in Markdown for each **thingInCol1**.

[jayb]

Hey there,

It’s just easier in some tables to present information that way. When there are a lot of headings, for example, but only one answer per heading.

For example:

Title | The Terminator
Year | 1984
Director | James Cameron
IMDB | 8.1
Box Office | $78.3 million
Other | Answer |
Other | Answer |
Other | Answer |
Other | Answer |
Other | Answer |
Other | Answer |

When there is a big list it’s not practical to have horizontal row headings.

I mean I could just use a colon but it’s messier and your eyes are not looking at the data in line (it’s staggered).

Cheers,

Jay

[scholarInTraining]

You can manually bold every item in the first column with Markdown ** and you can use colons on the second line of the table (with the dashes) to justify text left/center/right in each column.
Just note that these tricks will not produce the right HTML tags if you try to export the produced table elsewhere.