Chapter 3 Use Bootstrap Tables in gitbooks & epub

3.1 Gitbook

Most of kableExtra tricks will work in bookdown except those requiring bootstrap. By default, rmarkdown won’t load bootstrap for you on gitbook as it’s not necesary. In kableExtra, I used the bootstrap 3.3.7 customization tool and made a customized css copy. You can load it by setting options(kableExtra.html.bsTable = T).

library(kableExtra)
options(kableExtra.html.bsTable = T)

mtcars[1:5, 1:5] %>%
  kable(booktabs = T) %>% 
  kable_styling(
    bootstrap_options = c("striped","hover", "bordered", "condensed"),
    latex_options = c("striped")
  ) %>%
  column_spec(1, color = "red") %>%
  add_header_above(c(" ", "Group A" = 2, "Group B" = 3))

	Group A		Group B
	mpg	cyl	disp	hp	drat
Mazda RX4	21.0	6	160	110	3.90
Mazda RX4 Wag	21.0	6	160	110	3.90
Datsun 710	22.8	4	108	93	3.85
Hornet 4 Drive	21.4	6	258	110	3.08
Hornet Sportabout	18.7	8	360	175	3.15

One very important note here is that by default bookdown loads the gitbook table css on start up. It has some conflicts with bootstrap tables. As a result, some features like hover won’t be able to work by default. To solve this problem, you need to use the latest version of bookdown (version >= 0.7.21) and turn off the table_css option under bookdown::gitbook in _output.yml

bookdown::gitbook:
  table_css: false

3.2 Epub

Right now, it’s impossible to load addition CSS through HTML dependency and this mechanism exists for a reason ( See this issue I filed ). You will have to manually load this stylesheet by putting it to a CSS file (such as “style.css”) and load it in _output.yml. For example,

bookdown::epub_book: 
  stylesheet: style.css