How to write (bullet) lists in a table using rmarkdown and pandoc

Question

I am looking to create a table in a PDF document using rmarkdown, knitr and pander. The table should be nearly identical to Table 1 sh

Answer 1

The default multiline style table does not support arbitrary block elements inside of the cells, but the grid tables does. So this is possible, just make sure:

• you use grid style
• align the cell to the left
• use hard line breaks at the end of the list elements and enable keep.line.break

Quick demo:

mytable = data.frame(
    Concept     = c("Decoded", "XXX"),
    Description = c("* Founded in 2011\ \n* Offers workshops to take people from zero skills and knowledge in programming through to coding a multi-platform app using HTML, CSS and Javascript in a single day", "XXX"),
    Website     = c("http://decoded.com/uk/","XXX"))

pander::pander(mytable, keep.line.breaks = TRUE, style = 'grid', justify = 'left')

Resulting in a nicely formatted HTML list via pandoc:

<table>
<colgroup>
<col width="13%" />
<col width="43%" />
<col width="30%" />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th align="left">Concept</th>
<th align="left">Description</th>
<th align="left">Website</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td align="left">Decoded</td>
<td align="left">* Founded in 2011 * Offers workshops to take people from zero skills and knowledge in programming through to coding a multi-platform app using HTML, CSS and Javascript in a single day</td>
<td align="left">http://decoded.com/uk/</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td align="left">XXX</td>
<td align="left">XXX</td>
<td align="left">XXX</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

But works with PDF as well: