This may, strictly speaking, be a bug in the pandoc plugin, but I think it would be better to fix it in ikiwiki because of its kind (and maybe because I believe/hope pandoc will become the markdown dialect standard). For all I know it might not only affect pandoc tables.

When creating a simple table in pandoc-flavoured markdown,

1    2
---  ---
3    4

pandoc converts this to the html code

<table>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th align="left">1</th>
<th align="left">2</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td align="left">3</td>
<td align="left">4</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

<tr class="header"> causes it to be affected by style.css's

.header {
    margin: 0;
    font-size: 140%;
    font-weight: bold;
    line-height: 1em;
    display: block;
}

(more specifically by display: block;), which results in all header cells to cramp together in the first column.

The fix is easy: In style.css change .header { to .header tr:not(.header) {.

Alternatively, add the following code.

tr.header {
    display: table-row;
    }

I've added that last code snippet to my custom.css file. I admit .header tr:not(.header) is not especially elegant, but then again, I have almost no knowledge of CSS. There might be better solutions. (I don't even know why display: block; breaks the tables or why changing it to display: table-header; doesn't fix it but display: table-row; does  )

This is essentially a conflict between ikiwiki's expectations for the definitions of CSS classes, and pandoc's expectations. The ikiwiki templates use class="header" to mean essentially the same thing as a HTML5 <header>, while Pandoc assumes a different meaning.

I think div.header, header.header { is probably a cleaner fix, and I have done that.

FYI, display: block breaks the tables because it makes the <tr> not be treated as a table row by the browser's layout engine. table-header is not a valid value for the CSS display attribute so that won't work.

--smcv