kable: Vertical alignment does not work with pdf output

Question

I am trying to produce a large table in pdf mixing text and figures using kable. I am trying to align every row to the top. I made an example using a figure test.jpg located inside the working directory. I am using the version 1.22 of knitr.

---
output: pdf_document
---

```{r}
table <- data.frame(
  col1 = "test", 
  col2 = "![test](test.jpg){width=150px}")
knitr::kable(table)
```

It behaves correctly and aligns the figure and the text to the top if I knit it in html but it aligns the figure and the text at the bottom using the pdf. Specifying the valign option does not change the behavior.

Did anyone experience a similar behavior ?

Answer 1

I don't have a good solution, but I have a workaround. It's a cludge that uses the LaTeX package adjustbox – specifically, valign = T as an argument to includegraphics. (The scale = 0.5 just makes the image 50% its original size.) I've also thrown in an escaped linebreak (\\\\) for the sake of prettiness.

---
title: \textbf{Title}
author: \normalfont{Author}
output:
  pdf_document
header-includes:
  - \usepackage[export]{adjustbox}
---

```{r}
table <- dplyr::tibble(
  col1 = LETTERS[1:3], 
  col2= c("\\includegraphics[valign=T, scale=0.5]{Osedax_roseus.jpg} \\\\",
          "\\includegraphics[valign=T, scale=0.5]{Osedax_roseus.jpg} \\\\",
          "\\includegraphics[valign=T, scale=0.5]{Osedax_roseus.jpg} \\\\"))
knitr::kable(table, format = "latex", escape = FALSE)
```

This example uses the photo from this Wikipedia page.