Quarto integration?

[AaronGullickson]

Hello, I am a big fan of texreg and, in particular, the knitreg function that works so well in R Markdown. I am wondering if there are any plans to work on integration with Quarto, the "next-gen" version of R Markdown? I have been playing around with Quarto a bit and I have noticed that while texreg generally plays well with Quarto, there are a couple of issues. Namely:

• knitreg does not work, so I have to go back to using texreg, htmlreg, etc. to get output. This is not surprising, but it would be great to get a quarto aware version of this function.
• texreg does not work well with the new cross-referencing/label system in Quarto. The table itself seems to ignore the #| label: tlb-name argument in the code chunk. You can set the label directly in texreg itself, but this label also seems to be ignored. I am guessing it has to do with the ordering of how the document is processed.

[leifeld]

I am embarrassed to say that I've been completely unaware of Quarto. If you'd like to start a pull request and make suggestions on how to change the knitreg function, I would be happy to review the PR and provide advice. Not sure if it makes more sense to accommodate the functionality in knitreg or create a new quartoreg function. I'd assume the latter, but don't know anything about the differences between the two systems. If there is no pull request, I might get to it at some point when I see the need for myself or if a lot of people request this.

[AaronGullickson]

No worries. I will see if I can figure out some of this stuff and if so I will put up a PR.

[AaronGullickson]

Ok, coming back to this after awhile, but I am going to try to write a PR that adds a quartoreg function that operates similarly toknitreg but for Quarto docs. I am writing some notes to myself here so I remember this stuff.

Basically, the issue is how to get the rendering format so quartoreg knows what kind of code to output. Looking through the code for gt, and found this which I think is helpful:

if (knitr_is_rtf_output()) {

    # TODO: make this work for RTF
    x <- as_rtf(x)

  } else if (knitr::is_latex_output()) {

    # TODO: make this work for LaTeX
    x <- as_latex(x)

  } else if (knitr_is_word_output()) {

    word_tbls <- c()

    seq_tbls <- seq_len(nrow(x$gt_tbls))

    for (i in seq_tbls) {
      word_tbl_i <- as_word(grp_pull(x, which = i))
      word_tbls <- c(word_tbls, word_tbl_i)
    }

    word_tbls_combined <- paste(word_tbls, collapse = page_break_word())

    x <-
      knitr::asis_output(
        paste("```{=openxml}", word_tbls_combined, "```\n\n", sep = "\n")
      )

  } else {

    # TODO: make this work for HTML

    # Default to HTML output
    x <- as.tags.gt_tbl(x, ...)
  }

knitr_is_rtf_output <- function() {
  "rtf" %in% knitr::opts_knit$get("rmarkdown.pandoc.to")
}

knitr_is_word_output <- function() {
  "docx" %in% knitr::opts_knit$get("rmarkdown.pandoc.to")
}

[sagebiej]

I got into the same issue. I am not sure how kable and gtsummary do this, but there, you always get the right format. I have, similar to @AaronGullickson wrote a small workaround which works now for my purposes. I may try to get this stable, and also borrow from @AaronGullickson first attempts. I will then make a pull request.

One thing that may be difficult to handle is latex specific or html specific arguments. For example, I have added latex code into custom_model_names.

Here is my current function that basically extents knitreg. Maybe the eventual goal should be to have one function that handles both knitr and quarto. My function should do this, but some testing is required.

quartoreg <- function(...) {
  
  # -- dependencies -------------------------------------------------
  if (!requireNamespace("knitr", quietly = TRUE))
    stop("quartoreg() needs the 'knitr' package.")
  if (!requireNamespace("texreg", quietly = TRUE))
    stop("quartoreg() needs the 'texreg' package.")
  
  # -- 1.  Quarto / R Markdown (pandoc) branch ----------------------
  pandoc_to <- knitr::opts_knit$get("rmarkdown.pandoc.to")
  if (!is.null(pandoc_to) && length(pandoc_to) > 0) {
    
    if ("html"  %in% pandoc_to) {
      return(texreg::htmlreg(..., doctype = FALSE, star.symbol = "&#42;"))
    }
    
    if ("latex" %in% pandoc_to || "pdf" %in% pandoc_to) {
      return(texreg::texreg(...,  use.packages = FALSE))
    }
    
    if (any(pandoc_to %in% c("docx", "pptx"))) {
      mr <- texreg::matrixreg(...,
                              output.type        = "ascii",
                              include.attributes = FALSE,
                              trim               = TRUE)
      colnames(mr) <- mr[1, ]
      mr <- mr[-1, ]
      return(knitr::kable(mr))
    }
    
    return(texreg::screenreg(...))   # unknown/other target
  }
  
  # -- 2.  legacy knitreg code path --------------------------------
  out.format <- knitr::opts_knit$get("out.format")
  
  if (is.null(out.format)) {                       # R Notebook preview
    texreg::screenreg(...)
    
  } else if (out.format == "markdown") {           # .Rmd family
    if (!requireNamespace("rmarkdown", quietly = TRUE))
      stop("rmarkdown package required for Rmd rendering.")
    
    output <- rmarkdown::all_output_formats(knitr::current_input())[1]
    if (is.null(output)) {                         # .Rpres
      texreg::htmlreg(..., doctype = FALSE)
      
    } else if (output %in% c("html_document",
                             "bookdown::html_document2")) {
      texreg::htmlreg(..., doctype = FALSE, star.symbol = "&#42;")
      
    } else if (output %in% c("pdf_document",
                             "bookdown::pdf_document2",
                             "bookdown::pdf_book")) {
      texreg::texreg(..., use.packages = FALSE)
      
    } else if (output %in% c("word_document",
                             "powerpoint_presentation",
                             "bookdown::word_document2")) {
      mr <- texreg::matrixreg(...,
                              output.type        = "ascii",
                              include.attributes = FALSE,
                              trim               = TRUE)
      colnames(mr) <- mr[1, ]
      mr <- mr[-1, ]
      knitr::kable(mr)
      
    } else {
      texreg::htmlreg(..., doctype = FALSE)
    }
    
  } else if (out.format == "html") {               # .Rhtml
    texreg::htmlreg(..., doctype = FALSE)
    
  } else if (out.format %in% c("latex", "sweave")) { # .Rnw families
    texreg::texreg(..., use.packages = FALSE)
    
  } else {                                         # anything else
    texreg::screenreg(...)
  }
}

[AaronGullickson]

@sagebiej Happy to see you continue the work. After giving it a bit of a go, I decided to switch over to using modelsummary which integrates well with quarto, but I would love to see texreg handle it as well.