xtable + knitr set column width html

Question

How can I set the column widths of individual columns in the knitr (Rmd) output of a code chunk using the xtable package?

MWE

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
library(xtable)
```

```{r, results="asis", echo=FALSE}
print(xtable(mtcars[1:2, 1:2]), type="html", include.rownames=FALSE)
```

Lets say I want to make column_#1 - 2 inches wide and column_#2 - 3 inches wide.

I'm not married to xtable here but don't know of any other html table out packages that could do this.

Answer 1

You can change the css used by xtable to format the table and change columns width. It does not allow changing individual columns though.

See http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/custom-css-for-html-generated-using-rstudio/

An example below:

Add a stylesheet (here named custom.css) to the same folder as your markdown file.

table {
   max-width: 95%;
   border: 1px solid #ccc;
 }

th {
  background-color: #000000;
    color: #ffffff;
    width: 100px;
}

td {
  background-color: #dcdcdc;
  width: 100px;
}

and set the options to use this stylesheet

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
library(xtable)
options(rstudio.markdownToHTML = 
       function(inputFile, outputFile) {      
       require(markdown)
       markdownToHTML(inputFile, outputFile, stylesheet='custom.css')   
      }
)

```

```{r, results="asis", echo=FALSE}
print(xtable(mtcars[1:2, 1:2]), type="html", include.rownames=FALSE)
```

It might be possible to hack the print.xtable function to get more flexibility.