Can't override device size in pdf output

[apsteinmetz]

My latest project is about scanning an old book in German Fraktur typeface and putting the scanned page, Tesseract OCR text and English Google translation side-by-side. Humans can then easily correct the robots work.

How can I get precise control over location, size and scaling of mixed images, plots and tables in a PDF document? Banging my head against the wall. I want to display an image next to two tables and scale all three of those objects to fit a landscape pdf page. No matter what I try I can't seem to get the objects to scale AND fill up the page. It seems that the default graphics device size is constraining the output and I can't figure out how to override that. Here is an illustrative reprex (although I've tried many permuations of YAML headers, chunk headers, LaTex code and multipanelfigure parameters). This code produces a figure that crops the constituent elements and occupies only the upper right quadrant of the page. Thanks for any help.

---
output: pdf_document
classoption: landscape     
---


```{r sample, message=FALSE, warning=FALSE, include=FALSE}
library(knitr)
library(grid)
library(gridExtra)
library(magick)
library(multipanelfigure)

one_line <- "Here is some rando text that is 40 lines about 80 columns. See what I did there?"
df <- data.frame(text=rep(one_line,40))
img <- "https://jeroen.github.io/images/frink.png"

# instantiate
figure <- multi_panel_figure(
   columns = 4,
   rows = 1)

figure <- figure %>%
   fill_panel(panel = img,scaling = "stretch",column = c(1,2)) %>%
   fill_panel(tableGrob(df, theme = ttheme_default(base_size = 7)),
              row= 1,column = 3,panel_clip = "off") %>%
   fill_panel(tableGrob(df, theme = ttheme_default(base_size = 7), rows = NULL),
              row= 1,column = 4,panel_clip = "off")

figure

[HanOostdijk]

Maybe this (setting figure dimensions) helps

---
output: 
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: true
classoption: landscape     
---


```{r setup, message=FALSE, warning=FALSE,include=F}
library(knitr)
library(grid)
library(gridExtra)
library(magick)
library(multipanelfigure)
```

```{r sample}
one_line <- "Here is some rando text that is 40 lines about 80 columns. See what I did there?"
df <- data.frame(text=rep(one_line,40))
img <- "https://jeroen.github.io/images/frink.png"
```

# use columns
```{r plot_it1, fig.width=16, fig.height=8}
# instantiate

figure <- multi_panel_figure(
   columns = 4,
   rows = 1)

figure

figure <- figure %>%
   fill_panel(panel = img,scaling = "stretch",row=1,column = 1:2) %>%
   fill_panel(tableGrob(df, theme = ttheme_default(base_size = 7)),
              row= 1,column = 3,panel_clip = "off") %>%
   fill_panel(tableGrob(df, theme = ttheme_default(base_size = 7), rows = NULL),
              row= 1,column = 4,panel_clip = "off")
figure
```

[apsteinmetz]

Thanks I had tried that but I was using fig.width in the YAML section and the multi-panel-figure function call as well which didn't play well with the chunk options. I also found that adjusting the table cell size is possible in tableGrob(theme=ttheme_default()) which let me squish the rows down to fit on the page.