Markdown tables in beamer_presentation

[AmeliaMN]

I have been making beamer_presentation slides from RMarkdown for my classes. They work really well for my purposes, except for the fact that I can't figure out how to generate a table that works. An RMarkdown document with the following content:

---
title: "Table test"
output: beamer_presentation
---

## Table

First Header  | Second Header
------------- | -------------
Content Cell  | Content Cell
Content Cell  | Content Cell

Returns the following error,

! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> \@@magyar@captionfix 

Error: LaTeX failed to compile table_test.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. See table_test.log for more info.
Execution halted

It does work to make LaTeX tables,

\begin{table}[htbp]
\begin{tabular}{l|l}
First header & second header \\
\hline
Content cell & content cell \\
Content cell & content cell 
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

but I don't understand why the Markdown approach doesn't work. Thoughts?

[AmeliaMN]

@yihui, can you comment? I'd guess this is something I don't understand about the RMarkdown -> Pandoc -> PDF process, and probably whatever is going on here with tables is a symptom of a more general problem. Is it the |s?

[joels]

I don't get an error when I compile your example document. Are you using older installations of Latex or any Latex packages? What you're experiencing might be related to this issue.

[yihui]

I cannot reproduce the error, either. Could you provide xfun::session_info('rmarkdown')?

[AmeliaMN]

> xfun::session_info('rmarkdown')
R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Mojave 10.14.6, RStudio 1.2.5042

Locale: en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / C / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8

Package version:
  base64enc_0.1.3 digest_0.6.25   evaluate_0.14   glue_1.4.0     
  graphics_4.0.0  grDevices_4.0.0 highr_0.8       htmltools_0.4.0
  jsonlite_1.6.1  knitr_1.28      magrittr_1.5    markdown_1.1   
  methods_4.0.0   mime_0.9        Rcpp_1.0.4.6    rlang_0.4.6    
  rmarkdown_2.1   stats_4.0.0     stringi_1.4.6   stringr_1.4.0  
  tinytex_0.22    tools_4.0.0     utils_4.0.0     xfun_0.13      
  yaml_2.2.1     

Pandoc version: 2.3.1

I updated R and RStudio while trying to debug this myself, so I think I have up-to-date packages. And I'm pretty sure I ran through all the suggestions on https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging

[yihui]

It might have something to do with Pandoc 2.3.1. Could you try the RStudio Preview version? It has a higher version of Pandoc.

[AmeliaMN]

Still getting the error,

> xfun::session_info('rmarkdown')
R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Mojave 10.14.6, RStudio 1.3.957

Locale: en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / C / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8

Package version:
  base64enc_0.1.3 digest_0.6.25   evaluate_0.14   glue_1.4.0     
  graphics_4.0.0  grDevices_4.0.0 highr_0.8       htmltools_0.4.0
  jsonlite_1.6.1  knitr_1.28      magrittr_1.5    markdown_1.1   
  methods_4.0.0   mime_0.9        Rcpp_1.0.4.6    rlang_0.4.6    
  rmarkdown_2.1   stats_4.0.0     stringi_1.4.6   stringr_1.4.0  
  tinytex_0.22    tools_4.0.0     utils_4.0.0     xfun_0.13      
  yaml_2.2.1     

Pandoc version: 2.7.3

My best guess is that I'm actually using a different TeX distribution (I do have whatever comes with TeXShop on my Mac, as well). I just went into my RStudio preferences and "Use tinytex when compiling .tex files" wasn't checked, but I fixed that, restarted RStudio, and am still having the error.

[yihui]

The option "Use tinytex when compiling .tex files" should be irrelevant here (tinytex is always used for R Markdown documents).

You are probably using MacTeX right now. You may try TinyTeX instead:

tinytex::install_tinytex()

This has solved too many mysterious LaTeX issues in the past. See if you also have some luck with it.