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rflextable

In R flextable can complex symbols appear in column headings

Using flextable to make a table, I would like a column heading to be pi (with a hat) and an i subscript. With flextable 6 I see that I can add basic formatting to titles using the compose() function. I can get pi sub i easily but I don't see how to put the hat over the pi.

test <- data.frame(hat_pi_i= c(0.1, 0.9))

# devtools::install_github("davidgohel/flextable")  # version 6.x
# devtools::install_github("davidgohel/officer")  # for flextable 6 to work

library(flextable)
# compose conflicts with purrr & igraph
flextable(test) %>% 
  compose(part = "header", j = "hat_pi_i", 
          value = as_paragraph("hat π", as_sub("i")))

Is it possible to tweak the title above to put the hat on the pi instead of as a word next to it?

Solution

  • There's a hackish way to do it:

    flextable(test) %>% 
  compose(part = "header", j = "hat_pi_i", 
          value = as_paragraph("\U1D70B\U0302", as_sub("i")))

    screenshot

    This uses Unicode characters: \U1D70B is the math style pi, and \U0302 says to put a circumflex on the previous character. You could also do the first char with π, but it doesn't look as good, because (at least on my system) the circumflex ends up misplaced:

    screenshot