Question

In RestructuredText, you can render a header row in a table like this (taken from the documentation :

+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| Header row, column 1   | Header 2   | Header 3 | Header 4 |
| (header rows optional) |            |          |          |
+========================+============+==========+==========+
| body row 1, column 1   | column 2   | column 3 | column 4 |
+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| body row 2             | Cells may span columns.          |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+
| body row 3             | Cells may  | - Table cells       |
+------------------------+ span rows. | - contain           |
| body row 4             |            | - body elements.    |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+

Is it possible to do the something similar with the first column?
An example, which clearly doesn’t work, could be the following (note the double like at the end of column 1):

+------------------------++------------+----------+----------+
| Header row, column 1   || Header 2   | Header 3 | Header 4 |
| (header rows optional) ||            |          |          |
+========================++============+==========+==========+
| body row 1, column 1   || column 2   | column 3 | column 4 |
+------------------------++------------+----------+----------+
| body row 2             || Cells may span columns.          |
+------------------------++------------+---------------------+
| body row 3             || Cells may  | - Table cells       |
+------------------------++ span rows. | - contain           |
| body row 4             ||            | - body elements.    |
+------------------------++------------+---------------------+

Answer 1

You may achieve this using list-table directive with option stub-columns. Or, you may even combine stub-columns with header-rows. See the http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#list-table for the details. Hereafter is a simple example:

.. list-table:: Sample list table
   :widths: 10 20 20
   :header-rows: 1
   :stub-columns: 1

   * - 
     - Column 1
     - Column 2
   * - Row 1
     - Hello
     - World!
   * - Row 2
     - Hello
     - List Table!
   * - Row 3
     - This
     - Works

An obvious disadvantage is that you need to maintain table content as a list, which may be not that much convenient as with regular simple tables. So, you might want to check out the csv-table directive here: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#id1 , which also has option stub-columns.

If you need to stick to regular tables syntax – sorry, I’m not sure this is possible. As a workaround – you can use strong emphasis for text in the first column 🙂