Markdown formatting for books

I'm trying to put together a book with a table for fishing contest results, and have been putting in bold one row in the table in order to make the data stand out more. However, bold formatting adds over 700 characters, since its a long strip of text '' and so it makes it impossible to put in the table with bold formatting and additional introductory text, without the text of the book exceeding 8,000 characters.

While I find the character limit a nuisance in general, something that would help short of easing limits (or ignoring markup from the char count, which has its issues) is some type of markdown formatting like Discord uses,
https://support.discordapp.com/hc/e...xt-101-Chat-Formatting-Bold-Italic-Underline-

Or else something like wiki-markup,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Formatting

Depending on how its done, it could cut down 300-500 characters just to use my example.

Note, that it would still be useful for book formatting to use rows of asterisks or underscores in some cases, so the interpreter would have to be sensitive enough to context.