Gt: Cross references don't work in HTML

[malcolmbarrett]

Using caption doesn't quite work for bookdown::html_document2()

Reprex: https://rstudio.cloud/project/2259811

Screenshot:

[rich-iannone]

Sorry about the delay on this. Agree that this is a problem. @cderv do you know if this is an easy fix, given that {gt} already has support for html_document?

[cderv]

Currently gt does not have support out-of-the-box for bookdown caption. This means the manual way must be used as documented: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/tables.html (at the end of the page)

To be able to cross-reference a Markdown table, it must have a labeled caption of the form Table: (#label) Caption here, where label must have the prefix tab:, e.g., tab:simple-table.
If you decide to use other R packages to generate tables, you have to make sure the label for the table environment appears in the beginning of the table caption in the form (#label) (again, label must have the prefix tab:).

````markdown

title: "Untitled"
author: "Malcolm Barrett"
date: "3/2/2021"
output:
bookdown::html_document2: default

bookdown::pdf_document2: default

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)

Cross-references for gt tables seem to work on PDF but not HTML.

Check out Table \@ref(tab:gt-table)

```{r gt-table, echo = FALSE}
gt::gt(mtcars[1:5, 1:5], caption = "(#tab:gt-table) Test table 1")

Now see see Table \@ref(tab:mtcars).

{r mtcars, echo=FALSE} knitr::kable(mtcars[1:5, 1:5], caption = "Test table 2")
````

If you want full support, you need to preprend this in the caption text pass by user. There is a trick you can find in the code of how it works for knitr::kable(). You also need to deal with the various output format.
You can also look at flextable support for it.

[cderv]

Oh sorry, I did not look at the code. It seems it is supposed to be supported as you are using knitr:::kable_caption and knitr:::create_label with a copy of it.

So this is indeed not working. As in my screenshot above. Numbering is ok but the cpation in the table is not. 🤔

Sorry for my too quick answer

[cderv]

I believe the issue is only the escaping of the hash. You don't need that as your are outputting HTML directly with I don't think is process by Pandoc. You need to remove this (\\# and use only (#

[cderv]

Removing the escape characters indeed works. But the label part is not removed in the caption.
This is because

  <caption>(#tab:gt-table)Test table 1</caption>

is not matched but without leading whitespace it is.

<caption>(#tab:gt-table)Test table 1</caption>

This should be fixed in bookdown maybe for it to work with future bookdown - but if you removed the indentation if should work with past bookdown too. (not sure how the indentation is really sets with htmltools)

[cderv]

Oups @rich-iannone the keyword in bookdown's PR have closed this 😁

I let you reopen 😄

[malcolmbarrett]

Beautiful, thanks all!

Output with dev versions of gt and bookdown (as expected):

[cderv]

Great ! Thanks for the report!