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 Textile is
Textile marks header cells with |_. and data cells with plain pipes.
Redmine, and older Rails applications.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to Textile
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.
The header row is written with the |_. marker so it renders as a header.
What carries over from LaTeX to Textile
LaTeX records 3 things about a table that Textile has no way to hold.
LaTeX can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Textile 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 Textile, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Textile 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 Textile 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 Textile file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Textile.