Flextable breaks auto-numbering when floating in Quarto pdf

[atchley-sha]

When setting float = "float" in either set_flextable_defaults() or set_table_properties(opts_pdf = list()) in a Quarto document, flextable sets the table in a longtable environment within a table environment. My understanding is that longtable is not intended to float (see e.g. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/266698), and so this should likely be tabular or something similar.

The tables do seem to float correctly despite this, but the auto-numbering captions skip numbers, I assume because LaTeX sees two "tables" per flextable, one with table (captioned) and another with longtable (uncaptioned).

E.g.:

---
format: pdf
keep-tex: true
---

```{r}
library(flextable)
set_flextable_defaults(float = "float")
```

```{r}
#| label: tbl-ft1
#| tbl-cap: "ft1"

flextable(head(mtcars))
```

```{r}
#| label: tbl-ft2
#| tbl-cap: "ft2"

flextable(head(mtcars))
```

@tbl-ft1 @tbl-ft2

produces:

...
\begin{table}
\caption{\label{tbl-ft1}ft1 }\tabularnewline

\providecommand{\ascline}[3]{\noalign{\global\arrayrulewidth 1}\arrayrulecolor[HTML]{#2}\cline{#3}}

\begin{longtable}[c]{|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}|p{0.75in}}

<<table content>>
...

and

I believe this numbering issue would be fixed using tabular or something similar with floating tables, as this is how e.g. kableExtra does it and the numbering works fine there.

sessionInfo():

R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sonoma 14.0

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: America/Denver
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] flextable_0.9.4.001

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] jsonlite_1.8.7          compiler_4.3.1          crayon_1.5.2           
 [4] promises_1.2.1          zip_2.3.0               Rcpp_1.0.11            
 [7] xml2_1.3.5              later_1.3.1             fontquiver_0.2.1       
[10] systemfonts_1.0.5       textshaping_0.3.7       uuid_1.1-1             
[13] fastmap_1.1.1           mime_0.12               R6_2.5.1               
[16] gfonts_0.2.0            gdtools_0.3.4           curl_5.1.0             
[19] knitr_1.44              openssl_2.1.1           crul_1.4.0             
[22] shiny_1.7.5.1           rlang_1.1.1             httpcode_0.3.0         
[25] httpuv_1.6.11           xfun_0.40               cli_3.6.1              
[28] magrittr_2.0.3          digest_0.6.33           grid_4.3.1             
[31] rstudioapi_0.15.0       xtable_1.8-4            askpass_1.2.0          
[34] lifecycle_1.0.3         evaluate_0.22           glue_1.6.2             
[37] data.table_1.14.8       fontLiberation_0.1.0    officer_0.6.2          
[40] ragg_1.2.6              fontBitstreamVera_0.1.1 rmarkdown_2.25         
[43] tools_4.3.1             ellipsis_0.3.2          htmltools_0.5.6.1

This also occurs with the current CRAN version of flextable (0.9.3)

[davidgohel]

thanks for the report and the insight, we will try to fix

[davidgohel]

I'm not sure how to deal with this problem. It only happens with Quarto and not with 'R Markdown'.

Quarto doesn't seem to detect the structure as 'R Markdown' does.

The impact of changing from the 'longtable' environment to 'tabular' (if it works) only for quarto is quite substantial in terms of time. When I tried to test the dev version, I also noticed that PDF captions no longer worked and that an error appeared even without specifying a floating type.

So we will wait for a new stable release of quarto and adapt as we can when the new version will be ready.

[davidgohel]

This issue can be closed, it is now working as expected with Quarto 1.4.549

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