RMarkdown Kable Bandwidth Issues

Question

I am trying to create a table to store some basic information using Kable in RMarkdown, which will be generated in HTML, PDF and Word. Here is the code I have

--- title: "test" author: '' date: "2015/03/24" output: pdf_document: keep_tex: yes --- ```{r kable1, echo=FALSE} Variable <- c("VAR1", "VAR2", "VAR3", "VAR4") Label <- c("LABEL", "A very loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo nnnnnnngggggggg label yall", "LAB3", "LAB4") Classification <- c("Type1", "Type2", "Type1", "Type1") data <- data.frame(Variable, Label, Classification) library(knitr) kable(data) ``` ```{r kable2, echo=FALSE} Variable <- c("VAR1", "VAR2", "VAR3", "VAR4") Label <- c("LABEL", "LabLE", "LAB3", "LAB4") Classification <- c("Type1", "Type2", "Type1", "Type1") data <- data.frame(Variable, Label, Classification) library(knitr) kable(data) ``` 

The HTML output is as follows. This is what I want. I like the way the table fills html. However, when I create the PDF, I get the following.

As we can see, there are problems with the PDF, the first table goes from the page, and the second does not fill the entire width. I unfortunately have n00b when it comes to R, Kable and RMarkdown. Is there a way to set parameters in the kable table so that the PDF looks as good as HTML in terms of page layout and width? Thanks!

Answer 1

LaTeX will not break long lines inside a table cell for you - or you should use a custom environment for this, which can sometimes be very unpleasant when writing markdowns that should be handled by Pandoc. That's why I came up with the idea of ​​breaking long lines inside cells before moving on to markdown with the pander package . Quick example:

 > pander(data, split.cells = 30, split.table = Inf) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Variable Label Classification ---------- --------------------------------------------- ---------------- VAR1 LABEL Type1 VAR2 A very Type2 loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo nnnnnnngggggggg label yall VAR3 LAB3 Type1 VAR4 LAB4 Type1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Or, if you have multiple tables with the same problem, specify the split value once:

 > panderOptions('table.split.table', Inf) > pander(data) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Variable Label Classification ---------- --------------------------------------------- ---------------- VAR1 LABEL Type1 VAR2 A very Type2 loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo nnnnnnngggggggg label yall VAR3 LAB3 Type1 VAR4 LAB4 Type1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

In short, find the global parameters table.split.table and table.split.cells although there are other useful settings.