knitr::kable is there a way to reduce the font size?

Question

I am using this code chunk

```{r, echo = FALSE}
  knitr::kable(df)
```

However I would like to reduce the size of all font inside this table so that the output looks nicer. Is there a way to do that with kable or is there another package which supports it?

Answer 1

You can also try library(kableExtra). It has a lot of options to customise the table.

Specifically, for font size: https://haozhu233.github.io/kableExtra/awesome_table_in_html.html#font_size

df %>%
  kable("html") %>%
  kable_styling(font_size = 7)

Answer 2

I use \tiny before the function and \normalsize after it, which works for .pdf using the formats latex and markdown.

Answer 3

When you are happy with a global setting, use css on .table. To set it for one table, the only method I am aware of uses a div. Both methods cannot be used for latex etc, but the global method looks cleaner to me, because formating is delegated to a separate css.

---
title: "Small kable"
output: 
  html_document:
    css: kable.css

---

# Global setting

```{r}
library(knitr)
kable(iris[1:5,])
```


# Local setting, not portable
<div class="verysmall">

```{r}
kable(iris[1:5,])
```

</div>

CSS File

.table{
  width:auto;
  font-size: 12px;
}

.verysmall .table{
  font-size: 8px;
}

I also use auto-formatting for kable-tables in most cases.

Answer 4

Dieter's answer worked for me. My first time using CSS in rmarkdown. Instead of using a separate CSS file, I embedded the following code towards the top of my rmarkdown doc, as referenced here: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/html-css.html.

    ```{css, echo = FALSE}
    .verysmall .table{
      font-size: 8px;
    }
    ```