Include `tab.cap` in `eval.after` and other chunk options (port to knitr)

[rikudoukarthik]

Tables are an important part of documents generated using R markdown. Aside from the base kable, alternatives to creating tables like flextable recommend using tab.cap="" in the chunk options to define table captions. Very often, one would like to use inline code to generate elements of the caption, particularly since tables are often used to show data summaries. While this is easily done using a regular R string such as glue::glue("This is my caption, and {value1} is a value") for the fig.cap chunk option (after having set eval.after="fig.cap", which is now the default), this is currently not possible for tables because tab.cap is not an option in knitr but from officer.

There have been previous discussions (feature request) on porting this option over to knitr, but I don't think it has been prioritised. Given how frequently tables are generated in R markdown, I think it makes sense to allow the captioning for tables to follow the same format as for figures. My current workaround is to create a new initial chunk which creates the required objects, which are then referenced in-line in the subsequent chunks. But this is not very elegant, and it would be great to have caption options for tables and figures to be implemented in the same way.

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[yihui]

You can set it by yourself via opts_knit$set(), e.g.,

knitr::opts_knit$set(eval.after = c('tab.cap', 'fig.cap'))

If you want to apply this to all your documents, you can set a global option in your .Rprofile:

options(knitr.package.eval.after = c('tab.cap', 'fig.cap'))

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