Row Emphasis

[ghost]

Background

In markdown, it is possible to create the following table:

Item	MWh/y	Use	Cost
Farm	-28309.3	Food	7.2
Wind Turbines	29200.0	Electricity	4.6
Electric Grid	-15.5	Power	0.3
Plumbing	-5.5	Water	0.2
Pump Station	-2.5	Pressure	0.2
Sanitation	-1.5	Sewage	0.6
Recycling	0.5	Compost	0.4
Robotics	-690.3	Automation	2.0
$plot.device.vehicle.Name$	-122.7	Delivery	0.3
Houses	-40.0	Shelter	1.9
Roads		Transport	1.2
Total	13.2		18.9

In this table, the MWh/y and Cost columns are bold and fixed width. This allows a custom font to be applied via ConTeXt. The result is quite lovely:

Problem

It appears as though pander only supports a single mechanism for column emphasis (the double asterisk for bold).

Request

Is it possible to support both double asterisk and a double asterisk with backticks?

[daroczig]

That's an interesting proposal, thank you.

We currently have emphasize.rows/cols/cells for italics and emphasize.strong.rows/cols/cells for bold, so might easily add another set of options in pandoc.table and a new helper function like the current emphasize.cells for verbatim support.

But this might suggest to rename the current options a bit, e.g. we might have:

• emphasize.rows/cols/cells.italics
• emphasize.rows/cols/cells.bold
• emphasize.rows/cols/cells.verbtim

And the empasize could fail back to emphasize.italics. @RomanTsegelskyi, what do you think?

@DaveJarvis, until this is done, you might want to add the backticks to the columns before calling pander -- such as:

> i <- head(iris)
> i$Sepal.Width <- sapply(i$Sepal.Width, pandoc.verbatim.return)
> pander(i, emphasize.strong.cols = 2:3)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sepal.Length   Sepal.Width   Petal.Length   Petal.Width   Species 
-------------- ------------- -------------- ------------- ---------
     5.1         **`3.5`**      **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     4.9          **`3`**       **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     4.7         **`3.2`**      **1.3**          0.2       setosa  

     4.6         **`3.1`**      **1.5**          0.2       setosa  

     5.0         **`3.6`**      **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     5.4         **`3.9`**      **1.7**          0.4       setosa  
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Resulting in:

Sepal.Length	Sepal.Width	Petal.Length	Petal.Width	Species
5.1	3.5	1.4	0.2	setosa
4.9	3	1.4	0.2	setosa
4.7	3.2	1.3	0.2	setosa
4.6	3.1	1.5	0.2	setosa
5.0	3.6	1.4	0.2	setosa
5.4	3.9	1.7	0.4	setosa

[romantseg]

This seems like a great idea. @daroczig, wouldn't renaming options be bad for backward compatibility?

[daroczig]

@RomanTsegelskyi, sure it would :) But it's only the emphasize.rows/cols/cells what would change to emphasize.rows/cols/cells.italics -- and we can keep the old params/functions with the old names acting as the new ones (with a deprecated note in the docs), e.g.:

#' @param emphasize.rows deprecated for \code{emphasize.rows.italics} argument
#' @param emphasize.cols deprecated for \code{emphasize.cols.italics} argument
#' @param emphasize.cells deprecated for \code{emphasize.cells.italics} argument
#' @param emphasize.rows.italics a vector for a two dimensional table specifying which rows to emphasize
#' @param emphasize.cols.italics a vector for a two dimensional table specifying which cols to emphasize
#' @param emphasize.cells.italics a vector for one-dimensional tables or a matrix like structure with two columns for row and column indexes to be emphasized in two dimensional tables. See e.g. \code{which(..., arr.ind = TRUE)}
#' @param emphasize.strong.rows see \code{emphasize.rows} but in bold
#' @param emphasize.strong.cols see \code{emphasize.cols} but in bold
#' @param emphasize.strong.cells see \code{emphasize.cells} but in bold
#' @param emphasize.verbatim.rows see \code{emphasize.rows} but in verbatim
#' @param emphasize.verbatim.cols see \code{emphasize.cols} but in verbatim
#' @param emphasize.verbatim.cells see \code{emphasize.cells} but in verbatim

Well, this would result in even more arguments to pandoc.table, but IMO that's not a big deal.

[romantseg]

Implemented in #222

> pander(head(iris), emphasize.strong.cols = 2:3, emphasize.verbatim.cols = 2)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sepal.Length   Sepal.Width   Petal.Length   Petal.Width   Species 
-------------- ------------- -------------- ------------- ---------
     5.1         **`3.5`**      **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     4.9          **`3`**       **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     4.7         **`3.2`**      **1.3**          0.2       setosa  

     4.6         **`3.1`**      **1.5**          0.2       setosa  

      5          **`3.6`**      **1.4**          0.2       setosa  

     5.4         **`3.9`**      **1.7**          0.4       setosa  
-------------------------------------------------------------------

[daroczig]

Thanks a lot, @RomanTsegelskyi, closing.
@DaveJarvis, please let us know how this works.

[ghost]

Brilliant. This will work just fine. Thank you.