Render gt into a gtable grob

[thomasp85]

It would be very nice to put table designs created with gt into figures. For this to be possible gt objects need to be able to be rendered into gtable objects (or another type of grob).

For an example of this functionality (without the gt styling) see gridExtra::tableGrob()

[rich-iannone]

This is a great feature request, thanks!

[JohannesNE]

A workaround until this is implemented is to save the table as PNG and then add this PNG to the plot with e.g. {patchwork}.
(It is probably possible to skip saving to disk, but I'm unsure how).

Example:

tmp <- tempfile(fileext = '.png') #generate path to temp .png file
gtsave(gt, tmp) #save gt table as png
table_png <- png::readPNG(tmp, native = TRUE) # read tmp png file

library(patchwork)
plot_1 + table_png