Oh yes, if you are using bookdown, that won't be what you need.
Currently, there is no build in way to do that, but I hope we'll come up with something. List of Figures and Tables are only available to PDF output as built-in in Latex.
As I said above,
For other HTML output format, it would require to be a list of tables / figures that could link back to the closest header link. But it would be formatted differently than usual list...
It is not easy to know what should be done for a bookdown::gitbook() format. I am insterested in what you would expect the list of Tables and Figures to be like, as there will be no page number. Can you share your thoughts ?
When it will be built in Pandoc, it will surely be easy to do something about it in bookdown. For now, it would need to rely on a post processor step after the pdf has been generated, maybe couple with a lua filter as in pagedown. One trick is that the splitting process happens in R after pandoc conversion, so we need to know how files will be split and names to create link to them.
I got some ideas on that, but I willing to hear what you are wishing for as format and output.
Please feel free to open a feature request with this so we can discuss.
Currently there is one for building an index in HTML as in PDF (using latex)
Another project would be to have a way to transfrom a bookdown project to a pagedown output, so that it would be printable to PDF easily and maybe share some feature like those list of figure and table
Thanks for the suggestion !