docx table: set columns width seems not work

[aborruso]

Discussed in #6006

^{Originally posted by aborruso June 22, 2023}

Description

Hi,
when I render this qmd, the columns width it not the one I have set. How to force it to be 50,30,20?

I'm using quarto 1.4.43 in Debian 11.

---
title: "UV2"
format:
  docx:
    toc: false
    number-sections: false
    highlight-style: github
    tbl-colwidths: [50,30,20]
---

# test


| Question | Reply | Note |
| --- | --- | --- |
|aMagna sint duis proident do. Laboris Lorem exercitation consectetur quis|a|b|
|aMagna sint duis proident do. Laboris Lorem exercitation consectetur quis|a|b|

[mcanouil]

@aborruso Did you open this from the discussion you opened yesterday by mistake?

[aborruso]

@aborruso Did you open this from the discussion you opened yesterday by mistake?

Why by mistake @mcanouil ?
After I have created the discussion, I've reviewed and tested it other times: the output doesn't produce what is expected by the documentation, so an issue seems more useful and fairer to me.
Am I wrong?

[mcanouil]

Off topic

It's not about right or wrong.
I discovered the discussion and the issue nearly at the same time without any comment explaining why the issue has been opened or without any additional information.
One could read the fast opening of an issue from a discussion without reply (yet) as "being impatient" amongst other interpretation.
This also means two places for the same discussion.
It would have been better to open either an issue or a discussion and wait from there.

This being said:

• tbl-colwidths is indeed listed in the reference page for Word document format.
  It does have an effect, as the table occupies the full width of the page, but indeed, the column width is not respected (more of a side effect of Pandoc I believe).
• column specification does not work in Pandoc itself for Word document (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-pipe_tables)

Take the following table:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Column 1                                                Column 2
------------------------------------------------------  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I want the contents of this cell to fit into one line   Word1 Word2

------------------------------------------------------  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

: **Column 1 is narrow.** For column 1: 54 dashes in Markdown source for
separator line; for column 2: 162 dashes in separator line (300% of column 1).

Then:

• quarto pandoc index.qmd --from markdown --to html -o index.html
  
• quarto pandoc index.qmd --from markdown --to docx -o index.docx
  
• quarto pandoc index.qmd --from markdown --to pdf -o index.pdf
  

[mcanouil]

@dragonstyle Does tbl-colwidths supposed to work in Word document? I did not see anything in the codebase showing that Quarto is handling that itself.

[aborruso]

Hi @mcanouil ,

One could read the fast to open an issue from a discussion without reply (yet) as "being impatient" amongst other interpretation.

It's not nice to be rated as impatient. Especially in this wonderful discussion space, a fantastic application.

This also means two places for the same discussion.
It would have been better to open either an issue or a discussion and wait from there.

I had opened a discussion, but then I did some more tests and it seemed like a bug. And I thought it best to report it here.

In word documentation I read "An array of numbers (e.g. [40, 30, 30]): Array of explicit width percentages".

If in example I have,

---
title: "UV2"
format:
  docx:
    toc: false
    number-sections: false
    highlight-style: github
    tbl-colwidths: [40,30,30]
---

# test


| Question | Reply | Note |
| --- | --- | --- |
|c|a|b|
|c|a|b|

I have  [40, 30, 30] columns table

If I have long cells text

---
title: "UV2"
format:
  docx:
    toc: false
    number-sections: false
    highlight-style: github
    tbl-colwidths: [40,30,30]
---

# test


| Question | Reply | Note |
| --- | --- | --- |
|aMagna sint duis proident do. Laboris Lorem exercitation consectetur quis|a|b|
|aMagna sint duis proident do. Laboris Lorem exercitation consectetur quis|a|b|

I have that tbl-colwidths: [40,30,30] does not work.

It seems to me a bug and I thought it was useful to report it here in the issues section. If it's not a bug I'll close it immediately, and I open a PR to add in the word documentation "be careful, it doesn't work correctly with cells that contain long text".

[mcanouil]

It's not nice to be rated as impatient. Especially in this wonderful discussion space, a fantastic application.

@aborruso I did not say you were. I say one could think you were.
This is also why I asked the reason to open the issue while there was already the discussion.
All is fine from my end.

[mcanouil]

Thanks for the additional examples.

To note, from Pandoc documentation:

The cells of pipe tables cannot contain block elements like paragraphs and lists, and cannot span multiple lines. If any line of the markdown source is longer than the column width (see --columns), then the table will take up the full text width and the cell contents will wrap, with the relative cell widths determined by the number of dashes in the line separating the table header from the table body.

Hence the question about if Quarto has a specific code or not.

The issue about the columns width not respected seems to actually an issue with line wrapping in table cell.

[aborruso]

@aborruso I did not say you were. I say one could think you were.

My first post here at the beginning seems well documented to me.
It seems to me that it clearly reports - looking at the documentation - what appears to be a bug.
For bugs, I've always understood that it was better to open an issue and I never thought to make people think I was impatient.
I was hoping to appear as someone who wanted to give a small, little contribution.

Thank you for the pandoc note. If it has an impact on quarto, it would be better to include it in the quarto documentation as well.

[mcanouil]

We are making sure (or at least try) that any question no matter if they are bugs or actual questions are being answered, no matter if they are posted as GitHub Issues or Discussions.
My point is that since we go through both, you could have put a note in the discussion to state that you felt it was better to open an issue (which is 100% fine), hence to disregard the Discussion in favour of the issue.

There are currently no strict rules on where to post what by the way, so again nothing "wrong".

---

My first post here at the beginning seems well documented to me.
It seems to me that it clearly reports - looking at the documentation - what appears to be a bug.

I never said your welcomed report was not complete, but there is nothing more than in the discussion, as such it is a duplicate, hence my first comment asking why is that.

PS: @aborruso I am going to hide (not delete) few of the comments (mine as I can’t for yours) to avoid cluttering/diluting the issue you reported. Thanks again for that!

[mcanouil]

Some more investigation/clues that the issue is either with Word and/or Pandoc, thus possibly a documentation issue which indicates that it should work with Word document.

From the below code.

---
format: native
---

| fruit        | price        |
|--------------|--------------|
| apple juice  | 2.05         |
| pear juice   | 1.37         |
| orange juice | 3.09         |

: Fruit prices {tbl-colwidths="[1,99]"}

quarto render index.qmd

Then using Pandoc to render based on the AST/native format.

• Pandoc: AST to HTML

  quarto pandoc index.native --from native --to html -o index.html

  

• Pandoc: AST to DOCX

  quarto pandoc index.native --from native --to docx -o index.docx

  

[cderv]

it seems like something related to how Docx works.

When [1, 99] is set in Native form, the OPENXML output for Docx will be

            <w:tblGrid>
                <w:gridCol w:w="79" />
                <w:gridCol w:w="7840" />
            </w:tblGrid>

where 79 = ~1% x 7920 and 7840 = ~99% x 7920 where 7920 is the textwidth use for docx document and tables (from Pandoc's source)

So it seems Pandoc is writing something that takes into account the colwidth and it seems to be the right way from openxml spec. (other)

Not sure how DOCX should behave on this OPEN XML. Maybe Word is "fixing" some too small size, or maybe something is missing by Pandoc so that the sizing in OPEN XML works.

@rich-iannone maybe you have insight on column size in tables for DOCX ? 🤷