What LaTeX is
A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.
Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.
What Markdown is
A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.
README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to Markdown
The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.
Cells are padded so the source lines up in a plain text editor, pipes inside values are escaped, and line breaks inside a cell become <br> because a Markdown table row cannot span lines.
What carries over from LaTeX to Markdown
LaTeX records 3 things about a table that Markdown has no way to hold.
LaTeX can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Markdown has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in Markdown, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Markdown and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: LaTeX has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Markdown as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Markdown file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Markdown.