Don’t think its supported out of the box. Will create a story for it and dig in deeper. Is this urgently required, or a nice to have ?

Actually, I take that back. It’s supported pretty nicely. There a page with good textile examples that is worth looking at.

Multi column cells

|\2. spans two cols |
| col 1 | col 2 |

Will turn out as:

Multi row cells

|/3. spans 3 rows | a |
| b |
| c |

Will turn out as:

There’s a good reason for escaping HTML – its to avoid XSS vulnerabilities. However, things that can be used are span and br.