table cell merge (colspan + rowspan) support

[noor-tg]

hi, would you support table colspan and rowspan ?

I know that multimarkdown has support for colspan with the next example

| test | work |
| ----- |
| colspan||

so is there a way to support this ? or a way to allow use of multimarkdown instead of the current parser or converter ?

thank you.

[ehuss]

Hi! mdBook uses GitHub Flavored Markdown for tables. I do not believe it supports colspan or rowspan, so you will likely need to use HTML to encode such a table.

We are pretty tied to sticking with standard commonmark with only a few extensions, primarily those supported by GitHub. There isn't a way to use a different parser, and we are unlikely to use a different one. If GitHub ever extends their support, I imagine that is something we could follow up with.

You can implement a preprocessor which can translate your markdown to HTML, so you can use any syntax with that.

[noor-tg]

@ehuss ok, thank you.