great_tables table width settings not reflected in Quarto-generated Word output

[hasibagen]

Description

Hello Quarto team,

I'm encountering an issue when rendering great_tables (gt-style) tables in Quarto documents. Specifically, the tab_options() settings for controlling table width (e.g., table_width="300%") seem to be ignored when the final output format is Microsoft Word (.docx).

Minimal Reproducible Example

````qmd
---
title: "Reproducible Quarto Document"
format:  
  docx
engine: jupyter
jupyter: python3
---

This is a reproducible Quarto document using `format: html`.
It is written in Markdown and contains embedded Python code.
When you run the code, it will produce a message.

```{python}

import pandas as pd
from great_tables import GT

# Minimal example data in English
data = {
    "Region": ["Prefrontal", "Left Temporal", "Right Temporal"],
    "under_curve": [4.988946, -15.664746, -11.586672],
    "t_centroid": [56.0, 41.0, 27.0],
    "slop": [0.000383, 0.000160, 0.000138],
    "mean": [0.004870, -0.027652, -0.013757],
    "peak": [0.037685, 0.008440, 0.036546]
}

# Create the DataFrame
feature_df = pd.DataFrame(data)

# Create the GT table
feature_result = GT(
    pd.DataFrame(
        {
            "Region": feature_df["Region"],
            "S Score": feature_df["under_curve"].round(0).astype(int),  # rounding to integer
            "T Centroid": feature_df["t_centroid"].round(0).astype(int),  # rounding to integer
            "Mean": feature_df["mean"].round(2),
            "Peak": feature_df["peak"].round(2),
        }
    )
)

# Attempting to adjust the table width
feature_result2 = feature_result.tab_options(table_width="200%")

# Display the table
feature_result2

```

The end.
````

Expected Behavior
The table_width="300%" option should scale the table to a larger, more readable format, especially in Word output, where the default width makes the table appear cramped.

Actual Behavior
In VSCode's live preview, the width responds to tab_options() correctly and html format render correctly .

In Quarto's generated Word document, the table width appears unchanged regardless of the table_width setting.

Environment
great-tables version: 0.17.0

Python: 3.12.9 (via conda-forge)

Jupyter: 1.1.1

Quarto: 1.7.27

Format: Word (.docx)

Editor: VSCode

What I’ve Tried
Tried various units (px, %, and fixed values).

Made sure the modified object was being returned (not the original).

Verified that the issue only appears in Word output and not in HTML or live preview.

Confirmed no errors or warnings during rendering.

Question
Is there a known limitation or workaround in Quarto that prevents gt/great_tables styles like table_width from being respected in Word output? Is there a preferred way to control layout and width of programmatically generated tables in .docx format?

Any insight would be appreciated—thank you for your great work on Quarto!

There are some related posts, but none of them seem to be well solved. I still haven’t found the answer to my question.

• great tables with quarto and typst #10516
• Quarto in combination with graet_tables containing math: formatting does not work #10959

I have asked the developer of the gt package, but it seems that this is not a gt problem
posit-dev/great-tables#671 (comment)

[cderv]

I think there is two things here:

• First, contrary to the gt package in R, its python version great_tables does not support DOCX output natively. This means that in the Quarto context, it will output an HTML table.

• This leads to the second point: such a table can be output in Docx because Quarto will parse HTML table and then render them using Pandoc. This means that the missing support could be in two places :

• Does for .tab_options(table_width="200%") translate to something that can be parsed and available for non-HTML format?

• If so, do Pandoc's writers know how to handle it for the targeted format ?

By doing keep-md: true, I can see that table_width = "200%" translates to width: 200%; as a CSS style.

CSS styles won't be translated to something in DOCX tables, unfortunately.

This is something we've done for TYPST output, with what Typst offers - so with some limitation (See |Typst CSS](https://quarto.org/docs/advanced/typst/typst-css.html))

But translating global CSS for the table into OpenXml for the doc table does not seem straightforward for LaTeX or Docx. Pandoc does not support this, and we do not think it is doable in the current situation. The OpenXml spec for the docx table is rather sparse.

I know gt R 📦 supports outputting in OpenXml directly, so some tab_options() are supported. This would work in a Quarto context, and it can handle raw OPENXML.

Regarding size, I believe column sizes are supported (when in %), though, as they will be handled directly by Pandoc's table. So you could control the table size like this.

# Attempting to adjust the table width
feature_result2 = feature_result.cols_width(
        cases={
            "Region": "50%",
            "S Score": "10%",
            "T Centroid": "10%",
            "Mean": "10%",
            "Peak": "20%",
        }
)

Hope it helps