A toy example to demonstrate figure indexing when you want to include "chapters" from a template into a larger report document, and knit to Word.
A Word version of a report, with "results" chapters that loop through a set of parameters producing one section for each of those parameters. In my case, it will eventually be a list of 20-30 groundfish species. Here, for simplicity, it's cars w different numbers of cylinders. This is nice because you don't have to do any post-processing to get all the report sections to work together. No hijinx in Word... rejoice! 🎉
Eli Holmes (@eeholmes) has developed a solution for this in quarto that is even cleaner and more awesome, and I recommend it if you're starting out on your report-building journey. Look at the files Template.qmd and Parent_Template.qmd. The benefits of the new approach:
- Figure and table cross-references are much cleaner in the .qmd file
- Clean chunk notation for Quarto minimizes headaches
- You can interchangeably knit .docx and .html files, whereas using the "Markdown-only solution" below limits you to .docx.
I use knitr::knit_expand() and officer::run_reference() to label figures and tables separately and index them properly in the final Word document. Yay!
The main issue was this: the only way I knew how to create chapters iteratively was to use a for() loop with rmarkdown::render(), producing chapters. But then when I put them all together, the indexing in the final word doc didn't work because when you create a parameterized report, the figure tags are the same for each. So the Figures would be correctly labeled, but the in-text references would only refer to the first two figures in the larger report.
R:
R 4.2.1
RStudio:
RStudio 2022.07.1+554 "Spotted Wakerobin" Release (7872775ebddc40635780ca1ed238934c3345c5de, 2022-07-22) for Windows Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/5.12.8 Chrome/69.0.3497.128 Safari/537.36
Word:
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019