When we are talking about table generators in R, knitr::kable wins the favor of a lot of people by its ultimate simplicity. Unlike those powerful table rendering engine such as xtable, tables or even gridExtra, the philosophy behind kable is to make it easy for programmers to use. Just as it claimed in its function description,
This is a very simple table generator. It is simple by design. It is not intended to replace any other R packages for making tables. - Yihui
However, the ultimate simplicity of kable() brought troubles to some people, especially some new R users who may not have got exposed to other table making packages in R. It is not rare to see people including experienced user asking questions like how to center/left-align a table on Stack Overflow or twitter. These are the reasons why this package kableExtra was created.
I hope with kableExtra, you can
kable() for all simple tableskable() with kableExtra to generate 90 % of complex/advanced/self-customized/beautiful tables in either HTML or LaTeXkableExtra cannot solve the problemkableExtra is NOT a table generating package. It is a package that can "add features" to a kable() output using a syntax that every useR loves - the pipes %>%. We see similar approaches to deal with plots in packages like ggvis and plotly. There is no reason why we cannot use it with tables.
Most functionalities in kableExtra can work in both HTML and PDF. In fact, as long as you specifies format in kable() (which can be set globally through option knitr.table.format), functions in this package will pick the right way to manipulate the table be themselves. As a result, if users want to left align the table, kable(...) %>% kable_styling(position = "left") will work in both HTML and PDF.
devtools::install_github("haozhu233/kableExtra")
library(knitr) library(kableExtra) options(knitr.table.format = "html") # switch to "latex" in a pdf environment dt <- mtcars[1:5, 1:4] kable(dt, booktabs = T, caption = "Demo Table") %>% kable_styling(bootstrap_options = "striped", latex_options = "striped", full_width = F, font_size = 9) %>% add_header_above(c(" ", "Group 1" = 2, "Group 2[note]" = 2)) %>% add_footnote(c("table footnote"))