Merging multiple bodies request

[kylebutts]

Hi! I was thinking that a lot of the tables that I want to make involve multiple bodies that are appended together. What I'm referring to as the "body" of a table is Table body + Stub stuff + Column Labels:

It would be nice to be able to create 2 bodies and append them (perhaps with stub heads labeling them Panel A, Panel B) into a gt object with the title header and footer.

Is this easily implementable currently?

[rich-iannone]

This is a very good idea. I also like the idea of appending horizontally as well (i.e., more columns).

[kylebutts]

Giving this some thought, it would be nice to have a patchwork (https://github.com/thomasp85/patchwork) like syntax.

You could use:
|: gt1 | gt2. This would append Table Main horizontally, within the same header and footer.
/: gt1 \ gt2. This would append Table Main vertically, within the same header and footer.
+: gt1 + gt2. This would just append multiple gt objects vertically or horiziontally, i.e. different header and footers.

I think it doesn't make much sense to add functions that allow you to add in columns or rows into the "table body" because that can just be done before piping into gt(). I was envisioning often times wanting to combine tables simply for publication.

Thoughts of actually coding it:

1. The easier way to implement would just be to have a lot of requirements on the user: the table you're appending (gt2) would have to not have a header and footer, both tables have to have all the styling done. The "patchwork" functions, in other words, would have to be the last step.

2. The more elegant way (read: a lot of work), is to combine stubhead, stub, columns, and table body into a Table Main object (list containing the 4 lists). This is like having multiple geom "layers" in ggplot2 which is just a list of layers. In gt, I would think this would be a list of Table Mains, that you could then say "display horizontally/vertically".

Then you could add which = # argument to editing functions and this could just edit that particular Table Main in the list. This would get rid of the problem having to patchwork at the end.