Description

When we are talking about table generators in R, knitr's kable() function wins lots of flavor by its ultimate simplicity. Unlike those powerful table rendering engines such as xtable, the philosophy behind knitr::kable() is to make it easy for programmers to use. Just as it claimed in its function description, "this is a very simple table generator. It is simple by design. It is not intended to replace any other R packages for making tables. - Yihui".

However, the ultimate simplicity of kable() also brought troubles to some of us, especially for new R users, who may not have a lot of experience on generating tables in R. It is not rare to see people including experienced users asking questions like how to center/left-align a table on Stack Overflow. Also, for me personally, I found myself repeatedly parsing CSS into kable() for some very simple features like striped lines. For LaTeX, it's even worse since I'm almost Stack Overflow dependent for LaTeX... That's why this package kableExtra was created.

I hope with kableExtra, you can

• Use default base kable() (Or a good alternative for markdown tables is pander::pander()) for all simple tables

• Use kable() with kableExtra to generate 90 % of complex/advanced tables in either HTML or LaTeX

• Only have to mess with raw HTML/LaTeX in the last 10% cases where kableExtra cannot solve the problem

For a full package documentation, please visit the package documentation site for more information

Features

Pipable syntax: kableExtra is NOT a table generating package. It is a package that can "add features" to a kable output using a syntax that every useR loves - the pipe. We see similar approaches to deal with plots in packages like ggvis and plotly. There is no reason why we cannot use it with tables.

Unified functions for both HTML and PDF: Most functionalities in kableExtra can work in both HTML and PDF. In fact, as long as you specifies format in kable (which can be set globally through option knitr.table.format), functions in this package will pick the right way to manipulate the table be themselves. As a result, if users want to left align the table, kable_styling(kable(...), position = "left") will work in both HTML and PDF.

Note

If you found a feature on the documentation site that is not available in the version of kableExtra you are using, try to install the pre-release version from github. You can do so by running devtools::install_github("haozhu233/kableExtra").

Also, note that This package can load required LaTeX package automatically in vanilla rmarkdown. For customized rmarkdown templates, it is recommended to load related LaTeX packages manually.