Most of kableExtra tricks will work in bookdown except those requiring bootstrap. By default, rmarkdown won't load bootstrap for you on gitbook as it's not necesary. In kableExtra, I used the bootstrap 3.3.7 customization tool and made a customized css copy. You can load it by setting options(kableExtra.html.bsTable = T).
library(kableExtra) options(kableExtra.html.bsTable = T) mtcars[1:5, 1:5] %>% kable(booktabs = T) %>% kable_styling( bootstrap_options = c("striped","hover", "bordered", "condensed"), latex_options = c("striped") ) %>% column_spec(1, color = "red") %>% add_header_above(c(" ", "Group A" = 2, "Group B" = 3))
One very important note here is that by default bookdown loads the gitbook table css on start up. It has some conflicts with bootstrap tables. As a result, some features like hover won't be able to work by default. To solve this problem, you need to use the latest version of bookdown (version >= 0.7.21) and turn off the table_css option under bookdown::gitbook in _output.yml
bookdown::gitbook: table_css: false
Right now, it's impossible to load addition CSS through HTML dependency and this mechanism exists for a reason ( See this issue I filed ). You will have to manually load this stylesheet by putting it to a CSS file (such as "style.css") and load it in _output.yml. For example,
bookdown::epub_book: stylesheet: style.css