KableExtra: colortbl's \cellcolor not filling entire cell when used in combination with \makecell

Question

I'm looking for a workaround solution for a known issue where \cellcolor from the colortbl package does not work properly with \makecell. As mentioned, there probably already exists a workaround in Latex, but I'm hoping for a solution in terms of the R package kableExtra when producing pdfs using rmarkdown. Here's a screenshot; as can be seen, some cells are not filled entirely.

Here's a minimally reproducible example in rmarkdown:

library(kableExtra)
library(tidyverse)
# Data --------------------------------------------------------------------
df <- tribble(
  ~col1, ~col2, 
  "really long text that needs to be broken into multiple lines so it can fit", 4,
  "really long text that needs to be broken", 4,
  "really long text that needs a fix", 4,
) %>%
  modify_at(
    .x = .,
    .at = 1,
    .f = stringr::str_wrap,
    width = 25
  )
# Table -------------------------------------------------------------------
df %>%
  mutate(across(.cols = 1, .fns = linebreak, align = "l")) %>%
  kbl(x = ., escape = FALSE) %>%
  row_spec(row = 1:3, background = "#e5e5e5")

One possible fix is to specify keep_tex: true in the YAML and fix the issue in the .tex file manually before using pandoc. But I'm generating many tables and this can't possibly be efficient. Any suggestion of a potential workaround would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Why not use column_spec to force the line wrap rather than using makecell and linewrap?...

library(tibble)
library(dplyr) #for the pipe
library(kableExtra)


df <- tribble(
  ~col1, ~col2, 
  "really long text that needs to be broken into multiple lines so it can fit", 4,
  "really long text that needs to be broken", 4,
  "really long text that needs a fix", 4,
)


kbl(df) %>%
  column_spec(1, width = "30mm") %>% 
  row_spec(row = 1:3, background = "#e5e5e5")