autofit: Adjust columns to their content size

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Adjust columns to their content size

Description

Compute and apply the minimum widths and heights needed to display each cell's content on a single line, with an optional extra margin (add_w, add_h).

This function sizes columns to fit their content. It does not constrain the table to a given total width. To enforce a maximum width, use fit_columns() (wraps text) or fit_to_width() (shrinks font size).

Note that this function is not related to 'Microsoft Word' Autofit feature.

There is an alternative to fixed-width layouts that works well with HTML and Word output that can be set with set_table_properties(layout = "autofit"), see set_table_properties().

Usage

autofit(
  x,
  add_w = 0.1,
  add_h = 0.1,
  part = c("body", "header"),
  unit = "in",
  hspans = "none"
)

Arguments

x	a 'flextable' object, see flextable-package to learn how to create 'flextable' object.
add_w	extra width to add in inches
add_h	extra height to add in inches
part	part selector, see section Part selection with the part parameter in <Selectors in flextable>. Value 'all' can be used.
unit	unit for add_h and add_w, one of "in", "cm", "mm".
hspans	specifies how cells that are horizontally are included in the calculation. It must be one of the following values "none", "divided" or "included". If "none", widths of horizontally spanned cells is set to 0 (then do not affect the widths); if "divided", widths of horizontally spanned cells is divided by the number of spanned cells; if "included", all widths (included horizontally spanned cells) will be used in the calculation.

See Also

Other functions for flextable size management: dim.flextable(), dim_pretty(), fit_columns(), fit_to_width(), flextable_dim(), height(), hrule(), ncol_keys(), nrow_part(), set_table_properties(), width()

Examples

ft_1 <- flextable(head(mtcars))
ft_1
ft_2 <- autofit(ft_1)
ft_2

flextable documentation built on June 2, 2026, 9:08 a.m.