'Horizontal' Tables in Markdown (gitHub flavour)

Question

I'm using VS Code 1.86.2 on Ubuntu 22.

I'm trying to get it to render a 'horizontal' table (if that's the right term), whereby the first column is the heading, and is shaded, or in bold text:

| Head 1 | Col 1 |
| Head 2 | Col2  |

I tried this, but it just puts a line break across the page:

Head 1      Col 1
----------- --------------
Head 2      Col 2
----------- --------------

Answer 1

Markdown does not support landscape tables out of the box. The closest you can get with native Markdown is something like this (note that all the header entries are bold):

| **Heading 1**   | Content 1 | Content 2 |
| -------------   | --------- | --------- |
| **Heading 2**   | Content 3 | Content 4 |
| **Heading 3**   | Content 5 | Content 6 |

Heading 1	Content 1	Content 2
Heading 2	Content 3	Content 4
Heading 3	Content 5	Content 6

However, if you are in an environment that supports HTML and CSS you can use something like this:

<style>
  th:first-child {
    font-weight: bold;
  }

  th {
    font-weight: normal;
  }

  .bold-first-column td:first-child {
    font-weight: bold;
  }
</style>

Answer 2

Another option is to use HTML since it can be embedded in Markdown without any special syntax:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Head 1</th>
    <td>Col 1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>Head 2</th>
    <td>Col 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Stack Overflow seems to ignore table tags, but here's how it looks on GitHub: