compose: Set cell content from paragraph chunks

In flextable: Functions for Tabular Reporting

Set cell content from paragraph chunks

Description

Modify flextable displayed values with eventually mixed content paragraphs.

Function is handling complex formatting as image insertion with as_image(), superscript with as_sup(), formated text with as_chunk() and several other chunk functions.

Function mk_par is another name for compose as there is an unwanted conflict with package 'purrr'.

If you only need to add some content at the end or the beginning of paragraphs and keep existing content as it is, functions append_chunks() and prepend_chunks() should be prefered.

Usage

compose(x, i = NULL, j = NULL, value, part = "body", use_dot = FALSE)

mk_par(x, i = NULL, j = NULL, value, part = "body", use_dot = FALSE)

Arguments

x	a 'flextable' object, see flextable-package to learn how to create 'flextable' object.
i	row selector, see section Row selection with the i parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
j	column selector, see section Column selection with the j parameter in <Selectors in flextable>.
value	a call to function as_paragraph().
part	part selector, see section Part selection with the part parameter in <Selectors in flextable>. Value 'all' can be used.
use_dot	by default use_dot=FALSE; if use_dot=TRUE, value is evaluated within a data.frame augmented of a column named . containing the jth column.

See Also

fp_text_default(), as_chunk(), as_b(), as_word_field(), labelizor()

Other functions to compose cell content: append_chunks(), as_paragraph(), footnote(), labelizor(), prepend_chunks(), void()

Examples

ft_1 <- flextable(head(cars, n = 5), col_keys = c("speed", "dist", "comment"))
ft_1 <- mk_par(
  x = ft_1, j = "comment",
  i = ~ dist > 9,
  value = as_paragraph(
    colorize(as_i("speed: "), color = "gray"),
    as_sup(sprintf("%.0f", speed))
  )
)
ft_1 <- set_table_properties(ft_1, layout = "autofit")
ft_1

# using `use_dot = TRUE` ----
set.seed(8)
dat <- iris[sample.int(n = 150, size = 10), ]
dat <- dat[order(dat$Species), ]


ft_2 <- flextable(dat)
ft_2 <- mk_par(ft_2,
  j = ~ . - Species,
  value = as_paragraph(
    minibar(.,
      barcol = "white",
      height = .1
    )
  ), use_dot = TRUE
)
ft_2 <- theme_vader(ft_2)
ft_2 <- autofit(ft_2)
ft_2

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