Cross-references for tables and docx

[lorenzoFabbri]

Just to be 100% sure: there is currently absolutely no way of using packages like gt and flextable, and get cross-references to work with docx, right?

@cscheid @davidgohel @rich-iannone @cderv

[davidgohel]

(I am not part of Quarto team @lorenzoFabbri). flextable captions and cross ref works with quarto 1.3 for HTML and PDF by doing nothing about it (captions and cross ref are managed by Quarto). For Word, I understood it was planned for Quarto 1.4.

[lorenzoFabbri]

Okay thanks.

[cderv]

There is a big work ongoing with crossref to make them better and cover a lot of things. You can follow this:

• Epic: Crossref Overhaul #4944

Two main issues regarding this discussion are listed in the work covered

• missing reference for gt table in word document #3600
• missing reference for flextable table in word document #3601

It will also surely requires adaptation in what is produced by those packages. Some issues to follow

• cross-references are broken when output format is docx rstudio/gt#1140
• Quarto - Word cross reference davidgohel/flextable#494

Those issue will be updated once something is ready.

Patience is key here.

[lorenzoFabbri]

Suppose I forget about these packages and manually format the tables, and that I just need cross-referencing in docx, is there a way to achieve this? Thanks.

[cderv]

If you use Markdown tables tables as outputs, then you can use the reference syntax (https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/tables.html#cross-references)

You could also target HTML output (https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/tables.html#html-tables) as parsed them as Markdown inside Quarto.

Tools that produce openxml content for docx are not parsed - hence the specific treatment that should happen for cross ref to work, and this is part of #4944 big evolution