How to render images inside flextable in Rmarkdown

Question

I'm trying to render image inside flextable within a rmarkdown which on render gives word document.

Sample rmarkdown code:

---
title: "Untitled"
output: word_document
params:
  img_path1: Excel whole.png
---

library(officer)
library(flextable)
library(kableExtra)

virus_summary <- data.frame(
  Task = "Word Table",
  "Completion Date" = as.character(format(Sys.Date(), '%B %d, %Y')),
   stringsAsFactors = FALSE
 )

 img_object <- as_image(src = "./Excel whole.png", width = 1)



 virus_tbl <- virus_summary |>
   flextable() |>
   compose(
     j = "Task",
     i = 1,
     value = as_paragraph(
       as_chunk("\n"),
       as_chunk("Word Table"),
       as_chunk("\n"),
       as_chunk("\n"),
       img_object
    )
   ) |>
  border_remove() |>
   hline(part = "all", border = fp_border(color="black")) |>
   vline(border = fp_border(color="black")) |>
   vline_left(border = fp_border(color="black")) |>
   hline_top(part = "all", border = fp_border(color="black")) |>
   bold(bold = TRUE, part = "header") |>
   width(width = 7.9, j = 1,unit = "cm") |>
   width(width = 6.5, j = 2,unit = "cm") |>
   padding(padding = 10, part = "all")

 virus_tbl

In here you can use any image as you want.

Problem: When I run the code chunk only the image path is showing up instead of the image inside the table and same while knitting the rmarkdown into word document.

Output of above code: Output Table

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I get an error while running your script because source parameter for image of flextable::as_image() is src and not x. With kableExtra, there is also a function named as_image(), solution is to use the following:

img_object <- flextable::as_image(src = img.file, width = 1)

Without the conflicts that could happen with kableExtra, another point is that images in flextable can not be outputed with rmarkdown::word_document(), it must be processed with officedown. See the note in as_image() documentation:

This chunk option requires package officedown in a R Markdown context with Word output format.