Tables with typst: On captions and overflow

[dmenne]

Description

quarto 1.9.37/Windows/RStudio

I cannot make sense of the pdf generated with quarto -> typst when tables overflow a page and have or have not labels.

See https://github.com/orgs/quarto-dev/discussions/11456#discussioncomment-11274099, where @cscheid summarized the mystery as follow: "Captions in figures without labels are best thought of as "Pandoc captions", not "Quarto captions".

See also #9369

---
title: "Demo Long Table"
format: typst
echo: false
---



```{r}
library(tinytable)
library(knitr)
with_label = TRUE
tbl_fun = kable
#tbl_fun = tt
cat("with_label =", with_label)
```

* When with_label = FALSE, the second table is crammed into one page and does not overflow.

* When with_label = TRUE, _both_ tables are fine, but the first has no caption.

```{r, eval =  with_label}
#| label: tbl-iris1
#| tbl-cap-location: bottom
#| tbl-cap: "This is the first caption of iris, but it in top position when visible" 
tbl_fun(iris[1:40,])
```

```{r, eval = !with_label}
#| tbl-cap-location: bottom
#| tbl-cap: "This is the first caption of iris, in chunk without label; no long table" 
tbl_fun(iris[1:40,])
```


```{r}
#| label: tbl-iris2
#| tbl-cap-location: bottom
#| tbl-cap: "These are the cars. Caption is at the bottom, no overflow for kable. Looks good with tt." 
tbl_fun(mtcars)
```

[gordonwoodhull]

If Typst can't fit a table in either dimension, it will squish it. The usual workaround for tables with many rows is to allow figures to break across pages so that the table can too.

E.g.

```{=typst}
#show figure: set block(breakable: true)
```

Off and on we consider adding this to our template. Properly scoped to our tables, this would be:

#show figure.where(kind: "quarto-float-tbl"): set block(breakable: true)

[dmenne]

Perfect. Good enough for governmental work!