Customizing Table Output – Quarto (Pre-release)

Quarto includes a number of features aimed at making it easy to author and customize markdown table output, including:

Specifying column alignment and widths.
Providing captions, subcaptions, and cross-references.
Generating tables dynamically from executable code cells.

This post provides an overview of these capabilities in Quarto. For more detail about all the features Quarto for authoring tables, see Tables.

Markdown Tables

The most commonly used markdown table is known as a pipe table. Pipe tables support specifying per column alignment as well as captions. For example:

| Default | Left | Right | Center |
|---------|:-----|------:|:------:|
| 12      | 12   |    12 |   12   |
| 123     | 123  |   123 |  123   |
| 1       | 1    |     1 |   1    |

: Demonstration of pipe table sytnax

Here is the table rendered to HTML:

Demonstration of pipe table syntax
Default	Left	Right	Center
12	12	12	12
123	123	123	123
1	1	1	1

Caption Location

By default, table captions are positioned above tables. You can modify this behavior using the tbl-cap-location option. For example:

---
tbl-cap-location: top
---

Explicit Column Widths

Beyond standard pipe table syntax for expressing column width, you can also explicitly specify columns widths using the tbl-colwidths attribute or document-level option. For an individual markdown table, add the attribute after the caption. For example:

| fruit  | price  |
|--------|--------:
| apple  | 2.05   |
| pear   | 1.37   |
| orange | 3.09   |

: Fruit prices {tbl-colwidths="[75,25]"}

Note that this option is specified at the top level so that it can be shared by both PDF and HTML formats. If you are only targeting a single format you can place it alongside other format specific options.

Valid values for the caption location include:

Value	Description
`top`	Position the caption above the table.
`bottom`	Position the caption below the table.
`margin`	Position the caption in the margin.

Computations

All of the options described above work for tables produced by executable code cells. For example, here we apply the tbl-cap, tbl-colwidths and tbl-caption-location options to a code cell:

```{r}
#| tbl-cap: "Cars"
#| tbl-colwidths: [60,40]
#| tbl-cap-location: margin

library(knitr)
kable(head(cars))
```

In addition to the above, which focused on some of the features of Quarto when writing pipe tables in markdown, you can also author tables using grid syntax. You review the documentation. for more detail.