Support columns of values that use units (from the units R package)

[scotbader8858]

The units R package (https://github.com/r-quantities/units) supports vectors that have units attached. When in a table, and introduced to gt, these values have their units well-defined (separately as numerator and denominator) and they can be mixed_units (where each element should be checked for their units).

It would be really cool if gt could take advantage of these attached units and display them with nice typography. I guess the package could automatically format a column with units or there could be a specialized formatter function that would have to be used to force the formatting to occur. Either way, this would be really great.

[rich-iannone]

This is a great idea for a feature request! Thanks for filing this issue.

[brunj7]

I really like this idea. I think if you could add units to your gt table model as a special (sub)header that would be really powerful. An example: Streamflow would be the header name and m3/s would be the unit of the subheader. Relying on units and/or udnits2 to standardize them would be really useful to help promote the standardization of units when publishing tables.

We did some work on an R package metajam to bring data and metadata together from our data repository. I think if gt could enable adding metadata such as units to the table that would be really useful to scientists.

[rich-iannone]

We now generally have good support for units in the dev version of gt. There are the specialized functions cols_units() (https://gt.rstudio.com/reference/cols_units.html), fmt_units() (https://gt.rstudio.com/reference/fmt_units.html), and better support for units in cols_label() (https://gt.rstudio.com/reference/cols_label.html). While we're not using the units package, I think the original goal was achieved (having nicely-formatted units in the column labels and within table cells).