Option to omit longtable environment in Latex

[jonathandroth]

Thank you for the great package!

I think it would be great if the gtsave function had an option to omit the \begin{longtable} and \end{longtable} parts and only save the the text from \begin{tabular} to \end{tabular}. This would facilitate incorporating the output into Latex documents, and would be analogous to e.g. the contents_only option in xtable.

[spittssj]

I agree with this suggestion. Right now I am struggling to add captions and labels to LaTeX tables produced by the gt package and this would be an easy solution.

[jonathandroth]

@spittssj In case it's helpful as a work-around, I wrote some simple functions here to convert longtable to tabular in a text file. The same link also has a function to extract only the part between the \begin{tabular} and \end{tabular}. This post-processing worked pretty well for me, although it'd be great if it were eventually made internal to gt.

[spittssj]

@jonathandroth the link you provided doesn't work but the code you describes sounds useful. Can you check the link (or perhaps the security settings)? Thanks.

[jonathandroth]

@spittssj apologies, here is a public version https://github.com/jiafengkevinchen/logs-public/blob/6b2e96e482a2b389e182b1c8bbbc4d5023931fae/extract_tabular.R#L41

[spittssj]

Thanks @jonathandroth. I tried the code and it works well.

[jonathandroth]

Glad to hear!

…

On Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 2:33 PM Stephen Pitts SJ ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks @jonathandroth <https://github.com/jonathandroth>. I tried the code and it works well. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1310 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AE6EXFFTCEM5VZGA45JFZGTYLMRALAVCNFSM6AAAAAAXBIFCW6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTQNRZG4ZTIOJTGU> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[olivroy]

I think this would be fixed if #1588 is merged?

[jonathandroth]

I think not quite, because the request was to have the output begin with \begin{tabular}, whereas the new feature appears to output \begin{table} \\n \begin{tabular}.

Just to clarify, the motivation for this request is that I find it much easier to handle creating tables locally in Latex--- because captioning, labeling, and desired placement are specific to the document. So my Latex document would have

\begin{table}[<placement options desired for this doc>]
\input{gt_output.tex}
\caption{<relevant caption for my table>}
\label{<label>}
\end{table} 

Of course, while you're modifying this code, it seems like it should be straightforward to omit the \begin{table} \\n part.

[olivroy]

There is a new tab_options(latex.tbl.pos) that can help with positioning. tab_caption() is now kept in LaTeX output also

# dev gt 
# pak::pak("rstudio/gt")
library(gt)
gt(exibble) |>
  tab_caption("caption") |>
  tab_options(latex.tbl.pos = "h!") |>
  as_latex()

\begin{table}[h!]
\caption{caption} 
\fontsize{12.0pt}{14.4pt}\selectfont
\begin{tabular*}{\linewidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}rlcrrrrll}
\toprule
Num & Char & Fctr & Date & Time & Datetime & Currency & Row & Group \\ 
\midrule\addlinespace[2.5pt]
1.111e-01 & apricot & one & 2015-01-15 & 13:35 & 2018-01-01 02:22 & 49.950 & row\_1 & grp\_a \\ 
2.222e+00 & banana & two & 2015-02-15 & 14:40 & 2018-02-02 14:33 & 17.950 & row\_2 & grp\_a \\ 
3.333e+01 & coconut & three & 2015-03-15 & 15:45 & 2018-03-03 03:44 & 1.390 & row\_3 & grp\_a \\ 
4.444e+02 & durian & four & 2015-04-15 & 16:50 & 2018-04-04 15:55 & 65100.000 & row\_4 & grp\_a \\ 
5.550e+03 & – & five & 2015-05-15 & 17:55 & 2018-05-05 04:00 & 1325.810 & row\_5 & grp\_b \\ 
– & fig & six & 2015-06-15 & – & 2018-06-06 16:11 & 13.255 & row\_6 & grp\_b \\ 
7.770e+05 & grapefruit & seven & – & 19:10 & 2018-07-07 05:22 & – & row\_7 & grp\_b \\ 
8.880e+06 & honeydew & eight & 2015-08-15 & 20:20 & – & 0.440 & row\_8 & grp\_b \\ 
\bottomrule
\end{tabular*}
\end{table}

We may remove the font size shortly #1472 too. #1852

[olivroy]

Duplicate of #1549

[jonathandroth]

It's great that you can handle positioning and titles within gt.

However, I personally find it much easier to handle those in the Latex document itself, and not have to run my code again every time I want to change the title or position of my table. That is why it's much easier to have gt output only the \begin{tabular} ... \end{tabular} part without the table environment.

But totally understood if you don't have the time/energy to implement that. I can continue to ex-post process the output to remove the table environment as in the code snippet shared above.

[capnrefsmmat]

The other option would be to use a Rnw file instead of LaTeX. Rnw files are just LaTeX containing R code chunks, and can be processed by knitr, so you could have the table-generation code directly in the LaTeX source so it is automatically regenerated when you compile to PDF.