How to change padding of a table within markdown?

I'm building tables using Jekyll Spaceship and am not happy with how much space a single row takes up. My tables are quite simple which I have in a markdown file.

|              Stage | Direct Products | ATP Yields |
| -----------------: | --------------: | ---------: |
|         Glycolysis |          2 ATP              ||
| Pyruvaye oxidation |          2 NADH |      5 ATP |
|  Citric acid cycle |          2 ATP              ||
|                               30--32 ATP        |||

My problem is that the text takes up not even half the cell space with padding above and below the text.

How would I decrease the padding in a markdown file for rows in a table?

I've also tried adding the following ...

<style>
table, th, td {
    padding: 1px;
}
</style>

<div class="bettertd">

| .... placed markdown tables here ... |

</div>

And this put this in CSS ...

.features table {
    styles="padding:1px";
}

But didn't work.

Solution

At First, you can specific a class for the table as below:

|              Stage | Direct Products | ATP Yields |
| -----------------: | --------------: | ---------: |
|         Glycolysis |          2 ATP              ||
| Pyruvaye oxidation |          2 NADH |      5 ATP |
|  Citric acid cycle |          2 ATP              ||
|                               30--32 ATP        |||
{:.custom-table}

And Second step, you need to add your custom css styles to the your jekyll theme css file (usually under the _sass folder and named *.sass).

//...

.custom-table th, .custom-table td {
   padding: 1px;
   // any style you want ...
}

Or add to the head of your theme post layout (usually under the _layout folder and called *.html).

<html>
  <head>
    <!-- ... -->
    <style>
      .custom-table th, .custom-table td {
        padding: 1px;
        // any style you want ...
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
  </body>
<html>

Or even you using the element-processor of jekyll-spaceship to modify the element style (Click for more usage details), adding the config to your _config.yml as below:

jekyll-spaceship:
  element-processor:
    css:
      - [.custom-table th, .custom-table td]:  # Select the th, td nodes of custom table
          props:                               # Replace element properties
            style:                             # Add style attributes (Hash Style)
              padding: 1px                     # Add padding 
              # font-size: '1.2em'             # Add any style that you want