Option to specify the formatting of footnote marks

Modify the way footnote marks are formatted. This can be performed for those footnote marks that alight to the targeted text in cells in various locations in the table or the footnote marks that appear in the table footer. A simple specification string can be provided for either or both types of marks in opt_footnote_spec() . This function serves as a shortcut for using either of tab_options(footnotes.spec_ref = {spec}) or tab_options(footnotes.spec_ftr = {spec}).

Usage

opt_footnote_spec(data, spec_ref = NULL, spec_ftr = NULL)

Arguments

data

The gt table data object

obj:<gt_tbl> // required

This is the gt table object that is commonly created through use of the gt() function.

spec_ref, spec_ftr

Specifications for formatting of footnote marks

scalar<character> // default: NULL (optional)

Specification of the footnote marks when behaving as footnote references and as marks in the footer section of the table. This is a string containing spec characters. The default is the spec string "^i", which is superscript text set in italics.

Value

An object of class gt_tbl.

Specification rules for the formatting of footnote marks

A footnote spec consists of a string containing control characters for formatting. Not every type of formatting makes sense for footnote marks so the specification is purposefully constrained to the following:

as superscript text (with the "^" control character) or regular-sized text residing on the baseline
bold text (with "b"), italicized text (with "i"), or unstyled text (don't use either of the "b" or "i" control characters)
enclosure in parentheses (use "(" / ")") or square brackets (with "[" / "]")
a period following the mark (using "."); this is most commonly used in the table footer

With the aforementioned control characters we could, for instance, format the footnote marks to be superscript text in bold type with "^b". We might want the marks in the footer to be regular-sized text in parentheses, so the spec could be either "()" or "(x)" (you can optionally use "x" as a helpful placeholder for the marks).

Examples

Use a modified version of sp500 the dataset to create a gt table with row labels. We'll add two footnotes using the tab_footnote() function. We can call opt_footnote_spec() to specify that the marks of the footnote reference should be superscripts in bold, and, the marks in the footer section should be enclosed in parentheses.

sp500 |>
  dplyr::filter(date >= "1987-10-14" & date <= "1987-10-25") |>
  dplyr::select(date, open, close, volume) |>
  dplyr::mutate(difference = close - open) |>
  dplyr::mutate(change = (close - open) / open) |>
  dplyr::mutate(day = vec_fmt_datetime(date, format = "E")) |>
  dplyr::arrange(-dplyr::row_number()) |>
  gt(rowname_col = "date") |>
  fmt_currency() |>
  fmt_number(columns = volume, suffixing = TRUE) |>
  fmt_percent(columns = change) |>
  cols_move_to_start(columns = day) |>
  cols_width(
    stub() ~ px(130),
    day ~ px(50),
    everything() ~ px(100)
  ) |>
  tab_footnote(
    footnote = "Commerce report on trade deficit.",
    locations = cells_stub(rows = 1)
  ) |>
  tab_footnote(
    footnote = "Black Monday market crash, representing the greatest
    one-day percentage decline in U.S. stock market history.",
    locations = cells_body(columns = change, rows = change < -0.15)
  ) |>
  opt_footnote_spec(spec_ref = "^xb", spec_ftr = "(x)")

This image of a table was generated from the first code example in the `opt_footnote_spec()` help file.

Function ID

10-4

Function Introduced

v0.9.0 (Mar 31, 2023)