Markdown mode breaks table.el?

[RobertGoulding]

I am having a problem with markdown mode and emacs text tables. Essentially, whenever markdown mode is activated, tables in the buffer lose their blue interiors (see screenshots).

You can still enter text in cells and jump from cell to cell, but if you backspace, the whole table gets messed up and table mode becomes confused. At that point, I usually have to unrecognize the table in table.el, and then fix it up manually.

(If you open a file in markdown mode that contains tables, and ask emacs to recognize tables, it will recognize them -- but, again, no blue interiors, and very limited editing).

It seems to be specifically markdown-mode that breaks table.el. Other major and minor modes (that I've tried) coexist happily with it.

emacs: GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (i686-pc-mingw32)
markdown-mode: 2.1

[jrblevin]

Thanks for the detailed report.

It seems that table.el does not get along well with org-mode either. I'm not sure that it should though, because Org has it's own table syntax. Markdown, on the other hand, has no table syntax at all.

Pandoc does support tables of the form created by table.el, but it's the only processor to do so as far as I can tell. The most widely adopted form are the "pipe tables" supported by MultiMarkdown, Pandoc, PHP Markdown Extra, etc. If I attempt to support any table syntax, it will be that one (see #171).

I took a look and I couldn't tell why the delete key is not being overridden in the keymap specified in the table.el text properties, or why the table-cell face is not applied. If anyone wants to submit a patch to help fix the conflicts with table.el that doesn't break other things, I'll gladly take a look.