Creating a Quarto table with HTML links in for Google Drive

gwmngilfen · May 21, 2024, 10:20am

Howdy folks! I think I've found an issue in the Quarto renderer, but I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something before I open an issue.

The goal is to have a doc on Google Drive (so, DOCX output from Quarto) containing a table which has HTML links in one of the columns. I can get this to work for other formats, and in RStudio, but the DOCX files only work if I export the tables to a separate file - the renderer report fails to contain HTML. This happens with both gt and flextable so I think it's Quarto rather than either of those packages.

To illustrate, here's a short(ish) qmd file which makes a suitable table, saves it, and then renders it:

Quarto doc code

---
title: "Table URL Reprex"
author:
  - name: Greg Sutcliffe
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
format: docx
---

Rendering a table containing HTML seems to fail in DOCX format, while saving to a file works.

## Dataset

```{r}
df <- tibble::tibble(
  text = c("Google", "DuckDuckGo", "Bing"),
  url  = c( "https://google.com", "https://duckduckgo.com", "https://bing.com")
)
```

## GT Table
Make a `gt` table using `fmt_markdown` (`fmt_url` doesnt seem to work at all with DocX) - works if saved to a file, but not when rendered
```{r}
library(gt)

gtab <- df |>
  dplyr::mutate(url = glue::glue("[{url}]({url})")) |>
  gt() |>
  fmt_markdown(columns = url)

gtsave(gtab, 'gt.docx','/tmp/')

gtab
```

## Flextable

Similiarly, `flextable` works when saved but not when rendered:

```{r}
library(flextable)

ftab <- df |>
  flextable() |>
  mk_par(
    j = "url",
    value = as_paragraph(
      hyperlink_text(
        x = url, url = url, props = fp_text_default(color='blue')
      )
    )
  )

  save_as_docx(ftab, path='/tmp/ft.docx')

ftab
```

Neither rendered table works in LibreOffice or in Google Drive, but both exported files do.

This creates reprex.docx, gt.docx and ft.docx. If I upload the files to GDrive, then I can get some sceenshots:

Firstly, the rendered doc, which you can see has the raw URL text and style, but the the links are missing: