Prevent table being split in Rmarkdown

Question

Is there a way to put my table into one page? I have a table which is broken between two pages. Here is a reproducible example:

---
output: pdf_document
---

`r rep("Text", 400)`

```{r}
# This will create a page break
knitr::kable(mtcars, caption = "A split table")
```

This produces a 2 page pdf with a broken table as follows::

Answer 1

There are two easy ways to do this:

1. Add a page break

If you are only using the PDF output, you can actually integrate LaTeX commands directly into the report. Therefore the \newpage command will force a pagebreak as follows:

---
output: pdf_document
---

`r rep("Text", 400)`

\newpage
```{r}
knitr::kable(mtcars, caption = "A fixed table")
```

2. Use Page Floats:

As RMarkdown uses LaTeX to build the PDF, you can take advantage of the page floats feature. This can take some getting used to, but rather than locking the figure or table in a set position, LaTeX will try and place the figure in a position which it deems "best". With tables, it will try and remove any page breaks.

Here is an example. The table will float to the second page. Make sure to update the YAML to include the header-includes: argument as well:

---
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
   - \usepackage{booktabs}
---

`r rep("Text", 400)`

```{r}
knitr::kable(mtcars, format = "latex",
             caption = "A caption",
             booktabs = TRUE,
             longtable = FALSE)
```

`r rep("Text", 200)`

If you look at the output, you will see that the second chunk of text continues on the same page as the first, and that the table is centered on the second page. This is all done automatically by LaTeX and can avoid pain down the road if you add more text before the table which might have previously caused the table to be broken again.

Hope that helps.