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 Avro Schema is
An Avro schema describes a record: its name and its typed fields. It is the contract, not the data.
Kafka pipelines and anything in the Hadoop family.
What changes when you convert Markdown to Avro Schema
Leading and trailing pipes are optional and both are handled. A pipe the author escaped with a backslash is read as data rather than a column break, which is the usual reason a hand-written table parses one column too wide.
Types are inferred per column from the values present. Any column with a gap in it becomes a union with null, because a reader rejects a record whose non-nullable field is missing.
What carries over from Markdown to Avro Schema
Markdown records 2 things about a table that Avro has no way to hold.
Avro wants a type for each column, and Markdown does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
Avro has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Avro and is dropped. The values are what survives.