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How can I get the table caption prefix and autonumbering to work properly using knitr::opts_chunk$set() for R flextable to create word documents?

My question
How can I get the table caption prefix and autonumbering to work properly using knitr::opts_chunk$set() for R flextable to create word documents, as it was doing before one of the latest updates?

Expected caption
Table 1 : airquality dataset

Problem
Following my previous question regarding the autonaming and autonumbering of table captions for html (which was easily solved thanks to David Gohel reply), I post here another problem I am facing.

I am using the excellent flextable package to create reports in Word format with several elements defined with knitr::opts_chunk$set(). I present here a simplified example focusing on the creation of table caption.

Since one of the recent updates, the table caption is not working as it was: the word 'Table' has disapeared and there is no autonumbering anymore.

Attempts to find a solution
After searching stackoverflow and the flextable github issues (open and closed), and after checking on diffify, I can see there has been several modifications and fixes for the set_caption() function, but I cannot find a solution to my problem. I have upated to the devdevelopment versions of flextable, officedown and officer but that did not solve my problem.

My Rmd

---
title: 'Example of table caption problem using knitr::opts_chunk$set()'
output: 
  officedown::rdocx_document:
    reference_docx: template.docx
---

```{r}
# This version uses "output: officedown::rdocx_document" in YAML

```


```{r options, include=TRUE, echo=TRUE}

# if (!require("pacman")) install.packages("pacman") # install it if not already there

pacman::p_load(knitr, officedown, flextable, magrittr, data.table)

## define options for chunks including those with flextables
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  echo = FALSE,
  tab.lp = "Table :"
)

```


# Section 1

```{r}
ft <- flextable(head(airquality))

table_caption <- 'airquality dataset'

```

The caption table should have prefix and automunering in correct format: `Table 1 : airquality dataset`. 

But it is not the case since updating from 0.7.3 to 0.8.2 of `flextable`.


```{r first_table, tab.cap = table_caption}
ft
```



## Styles of template.docx
```{r}

x <- here::here('template.docx') %>%
  officer::read_docx() %>% 
  officer::styles_info() %>%
  data.table::setDT() 


x[style_id %like% 'Caption',]
```



## session info

```{r}
sessionInfo()

```



```{r}

```

The output in Word
We can see that 'Table 1 :' is not there. The image also shows that the template.docx has the expected style_name ('Table Caption') that is correctly used for the table caption.

enter image description here

## R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
## Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
## Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)
## 
## Matrix products: default
## 
## locale:
## [1] LC_COLLATE=French_Switzerland.utf8  LC_CTYPE=French_Switzerland.utf8   
## [3] LC_MONETARY=French_Switzerland.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                       
## [5] LC_TIME=French_Switzerland.utf8    
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] data.table_1.14.2    magrittr_2.0.3       flextable_0.8.3.004 
## [4] officedown_0.2.5.001 knitr_1.40          
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] Rcpp_1.0.9        rstudioapi_0.14   xml2_1.3.3        uuid_1.1-0       
##  [5] here_1.0.1        R6_2.5.1          rlang_1.0.6       fastmap_1.1.0    
##  [9] stringr_1.4.1     tools_4.2.1       grid_4.2.1        pacman_0.5.1     
## [13] xfun_0.33         rvg_0.2.5         cli_3.4.0         htmltools_0.5.3  
## [17] systemfonts_1.0.4 rprojroot_2.0.3   yaml_2.3.5        digest_0.6.29    
## [21] zip_2.2.1         officer_0.4.4.010 base64enc_0.1-3   memoise_2.0.1    
## [25] cachem_1.0.6      evaluate_0.16     rmarkdown_2.16    stringi_1.7.8    
## [29] compiler_4.2.1    gdtools_0.2.4
Solution

  • @davidgohel provided me with the explanation and the files

    I left two examples, one with bookdown, one with only rmarkdown.

    Two templates:

    . if rmarkdown, titles and caption styles should be numbered in template
    . if bookdown, titles and caption styles should not be numbered in template as bookdown will prepend numbers to them in the doc

    Thanks again David for providing solutions very quickly !