Selecting and colouring single table cells with kableExtra in R markdown cell_spec

Question

I use R markdown in combination with LaTeX to create dynamic PDF reports. To generate the summarizing tables I use the kableExtra package.

I'd like to change the styling of individual cells.

Example: Consider the R dataframe mtcars[1:10, 1:5]. Using this would be rendered into some nice table:

kable(mtcars[1:10, 1:5], format="latex", booktabs = T)`

Rendered table

Now I want to change the style of certain cells. Say the 2nd and 8th entry of mpg should be green, the 4th and 5th of disp should be orange and italicized and the last four entries of drat should be red and bold. And the same cells should be like that, no matter which entries are in the cells.

I'm perfectly aware of the documentation and the examples, such as row and column specific colouring. But the documentation for cell_spec deals only with conditional logic depending on the cell values, while I'd like to colour the cells independently.

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited May 02 '18 at 16:45

11

As you have seen, the cell_spec function is useful if you want to colour a whole row or column. As kableExtra does not supply a function to directly edit a single cell, the "easiest" way to do this is to directly paste the LaTeX commands into the cell. I have used this approach in a similar answer here:

---
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
  - \usepackage{booktabs}
---

```{r pressure, echo=FALSE}

df <- mtcars[1:10, 1:5]

df[1,5] <- paste0("\\underline{", df[1,5], "}")
df[1,1] <- paste0("\\textcolor{red}{", df[1,1], "}")
df[2,2] <- paste0("\\textcolor{green}{\\textbf{", df[2,2], "}}")
# # Equivalent to:
# library(kableExtra)
# df[1, 5] <- cell_spec(df[1, 5], "latex", underline = T)
# df[1, 1] <- cell_spec(df[1, 1], "latex", color = "red")
# df[2, 2] <- cell_spec(df[2, 2], "latex", color = "green", bold = T)

knitr::kable(df, format="latex", booktabs = T, escape = F)

```

You can adapt this to work for your example. You may want to check out the available LaTeX formatting here: https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Bold,_italics_and_underlining

edited May 02 '18 at 16:45

Hao

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answered May 02 '18 at 13:49

Michael Harper

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I added some `cell_spec` examples for people who don't want to remember too much latex ;) – Hao May 02 '18 at 16:52
1

@Hao I prefer that method :) hadn't realised you can do it like that – Michael Harper May 02 '18 at 17:09
Hao, thank you for adding the latex equivalent. I needed a bit more flexibility (a cell *partially* bolded) - hopefully, that will do the trick! – Nova Sep 22 '18 at 19:07
how to achieve this in html output? – Nicolas Molano Apr 09 '20 at 15:23
Short of time to answer, but recommend looking at the docs: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/kableExtra/vignettes/awesome_table_in_html.html – Michael Harper Apr 09 '20 at 15:39

Selecting and colouring single table cells with kableExtra in R markdown cell_spec

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