Tab stops are put in column 1 ignoring the selection (e.g. j=3:8)

[adrianolszewski]

Hello @davidgohel
First of all, thank you wholeheartedly for bringing decimal (and other) tabulation marks into flextable. It is totally a game changer!
And it works perfectly.

Only I noticed one thing. I formatted a table, where the 2 first columns described the content, and the remaining columns held the numeric content.

In the 1st column I prepended the content with "\t" to mimic a nested hierarchy of items. That's very common in my field.

I didn't need any specific positions of tab stops here. Just plain, simple tabs. So I explicitly told flextable to put tab stops only in concrete cells: at the cross of i=1:nrow(data) and j=3:8.

Yet the tab stops were put in the first column too, which spoiled the hierarchy.

Luckily it was enough to select the 1 column and delete the tab stops with a mouse to fix it.

Maybe this issue was caused by the fact that I merged cells in the the 1 row to make a vertical sub-header?

[adrianolszewski]

Is it possible to set the tab stops for a selection of columns?

When I tried doing separate assignments, an error was returned:

   tab_settings(part="body",
+                i=1:nrow(result),
+                j=3:8,
+                fp_tabs(
+                  fp_tab(pos = 0.65/2.54, style="decimal")
+                )) +
+   
+   tab_settings(part="body",
+                i=1:nrow(result),
+                j=14,
+                fp_tabs(
+                  fp_tab(pos = 0.7/2.54, style="decimal"),
+                  fp_tab(pos = 1.23/2.54, style="left"),
+                  fp_tab(pos = 1.97/2.54, style="decimal")
+                ))

Error in nrow_part(x, part) :
Function `nrow_part()` supports only flextable objects.

And it seems that tab stops are set indeed for the entire table, it ignores the column selection.

[davidgohel]

Hello,

sorry, we can't reproduce the error. We would need a reproductible example!

In the code you shared, you are using +, is it not |> that you wanted to use ?

[adrianolszewski]

Dear @davidgohel ,
I'm sorry, there was indeed a typo. But regardless of that the problem still exists.
Namely, the "j" index for columns isn't honoured + only the last tab_settings is applied...

To run it the following template will be necessary - that's because I set the overall tabulation width to 0.4.
You can do it also manually if you prefer (without the template).
The template:
output_template.docx

The data:

df <- structure(list(PT = c("Gastrointestinal disorders", "\tNausea", 
"\tTotal"), Patients_SOC = c(NA, "\t1\t(\t100.0%)", "\t1"), Events_SOC = c(NA, 
"\t1\t(\t100.0%)", "\t1"), Patients_All = c(NA, "20.0%", "20.0%"
), Events_All = c(NA, "12.5%", "12.5%")), row.names = c(NA, -3L
), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

> df

  PT                           Patients_SOC      Events_SOC        Patients_All Events_All
  <chr>                        <chr>             <chr>             <chr>        <chr>     
1 "Gastrointestinal disorders"  NA                NA               NA           NA        
2 "\tNausea"                   "\t1\t(\t100.0%)" "\t1\t(\t100.0%)" 20.0%        12.5%     
3 "\tTotal"                    "\t1"             "\t1"             20.0%        12.5%   

The code:

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(officer)
library(flextable)

set_flextable_defaults(
  font.family = "Arial Narrow",
  font.size = 10,
  padding = 1,
  padding.left = 1,
  padding.right = 1,
  line_spacing = 1
)

ft <- df |>
  flextable() |>
  theme_booktabs() |>
  width(width = c(5.5, rep(2.7, 4)), unit = "cm") |>
  tab_settings(
    part = "body",
    j = 2:3,
    i = 1:nrow(df),
    fp_tabs(
      fp_tab(pos = 0.50 / 2.54, style = "decimal"),
      fp_tab(pos = 0.83 / 2.54, style = "left"),
      fp_tab(pos = 1.50 / 2.54, style = "decimal")
    )
  ) |>
  tab_settings(
    part = "body",
    j = 4:5,
    i = 1:nrow(df),
    fp_tabs(
      fp_tab(pos = 0.62 / 2.54, style = "decimal")
    )
  )

read_docx("./output_template.docx") |>
  officer::body_remove() |>
  body_add_fpar(fpar(value = "Some caption"), style = "TFL_caption") |>
  body_add_flextable(value = ft) |>
  body_end_section_portrait() |>
  print(target = "tab_test.docx")

It produces the output like this:

I attach this file as well.
tab_test.docx

My intention was as below:

1. No tab stop in the 1st column (the default one is good).
   

2. There should be 3 tab stops in columns 2 and 3 as defined in the above code
   

3. In the last 2 columns there should be just single decimal tab stop
   

So, together, this is what I expect

And the file:
tab_test.docx

PS: would it be possible to allow for units in the tab stop definitions? Something like fp_tab(pos = 1.50, style="decimal", unit="cm"), similarly to already existing possibility for width(width = c(5.5, rep(2.7, 4)), unit = "cm").

---

> packageVersion("officer")
[1] ‘0.6.7’
> packageVersion("flextable")
[1] ‘0.9.7’

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Polish_Poland.utf8  LC_CTYPE=Polish_Poland.utf8    LC_MONETARY=Polish_Poland.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                  
[5] LC_TIME=Polish_Poland.utf8    

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

other attached packages:
[1] flextable_0.9.7 officer_0.6.7   tidyr_1.3.1     dplyr_1.1.4    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] zip_2.3.0               Rcpp_1.0.11             fontBitstreamVera_0.1.1 pillar_1.9.0            compiler_4.2.0         
 [6] forcats_1.0.0           tools_4.2.0             digest_0.6.33           uuid_1.1-1              evaluate_0.23          
[11] lifecycle_1.0.3         tibble_3.2.1            pkgconfig_2.0.3         rlang_1.1.1             cli_3.6.1              
[16] rstudioapi_0.15.0       xfun_0.41               fontLiberation_0.1.0    haven_2.5.3             fastmap_1.1.1          
[21] withr_2.5.2             knitr_1.45              xml2_1.3.5              generics_0.1.3          gdtools_0.4.1          
[26] vctrs_0.6.4             systemfonts_1.1.0       askpass_1.2.0           hms_1.1.3               grid_4.2.0             
[31] tidyselect_1.2.0        glue_1.6.2              data.table_1.14.8       R6_2.5.1                textshaping_0.3.7      
[36] fansi_1.0.5             rmarkdown_2.25          tzdb_0.4.0              readr_2.1.4             purrr_1.0.2            
[41] magrittr_2.0.3          fontquiver_0.2.1        htmltools_0.5.6.1       ragg_1.2.6              utf8_1.2.4             
[46] openssl_2.1.1