Limit column width for paged rmarkdown tables

Question

Let's say I have an Rmarkdown document. In that document, I create an data frame with two columns, and each of them is quite long. Also I have the "paged" output setting.

---
title: "Long Tables"
output:
  html_document:
    toc: true
    toc_depth: 3
    df_print: paged
---

```{r}
alphabet = paste(LETTERS, letters, collapse = "", sep = "")
data.frame(
    a = rep(alphabet, 10),
    b = rep(alphabet, 10)
)

When I knit this to HTML, it appears like this:

It is important that I can get both columns to fit on screen without the user having to click through to each column. Ideally there would be an rmarkdown setting to solve this. If not, is there a way to actually truncate the columns behind the scenes, but without actually showing the user the code that is doing the truncation? Because this will complicate the example that I am demonstrating in the document.

Do you want that both columns will be on the same page? – manro Nov 26 '21 at 10:33 — manro, Nov 26 '21 at 10:33
Yes, the same page of the paged table. – Migwell Nov 26 '21 at 10:59 — Migwell, Nov 26 '21 at 10:59

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 26 '21 at 11:56

Try this solution:

Your data:

```{r, echo=FALSE}
alphabet = paste(LETTERS, letters, collapse = "", sep = "")
df <- data.frame(
       a = rep(alphabet, 10),
       b = rep(alphabet, 10)
)
```

Your table:

```{r, echo=FALSE, warning=FALSE}
library(DT)
datatable(df, extensions = 'FixedColumns')
```

P.S. How to customize your table further - you can find a lot of interesting info there

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 31 '22 at 11:01

A different solution is setting the style (CSS) for the table. This means that you can determine your own width of the table. So this code is behind the scenes, because when you open the html, you actually don't see the CSS code. You can use the following code:

---
title: "Long Tables"
output:
  html_document:
    toc: true
    toc_depth: 3
    df_print: paged
---

<div style="width = 100%">
```{r}
alphabet = paste(LETTERS, letters, collapse = "", sep = "")
df <- data.frame(
    a = rep(alphabet, 10),
    b = rep(alphabet, 10)
)
DT::datatable(df)
```
</div>

Output looks like this:

Limit column width for paged rmarkdown tables

2 Answers2