Greek letters in column title

[mjroux69]

I'm trying to format the column titles in a gt table, to

1. include greek letters (more specifically the mu, µ)
   The encoding is set to UTF-8 in the R Studio options.

As mu is directly accessible on French keyboards, I initially included it directly in the string
cols_label(total_length = "Total length (µm)")
However, in the output, it is replaced by a white question mark in a black diamond.
The second attempt was to use markdown formatting
cols_label(total_length = md("Total length ($\mu$m)")
Error: '\m' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""Total length ($\m"
Doubling the dollar signs brought a similar error message:
Error: '\m' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""Total length ($$\m"

With not much hope, as it should lead to the same output as the first syntax, I tried
cols_label(total_length = paste("Total length (", intToUtf8(0xB5), "m)", sep =""))
and indeed it produced the same output with the white question mark in a black diamond.

What is the way to go ?

2. Include superscript
   This should be straightforward using cols_label() and md().
   However, while md() processes correctly the italic and bold tags, it does not process the ^to render superscript:
   Using html() and the tags works, but I was wondering why md() does not work here, while it works fine in ggplot.

Best regards,

Michel

[mjroux69]

I solved the mu issue by switching to html()with the μ code.

[alex-lauer]

Switching to unicode encoding worked for me:

library(gt)
data("exibble")

exibble %>% 
  gt() %>% 
  cols_label(num = "Total Length (\U03BCm)")

[mjroux69]

Thanks Alexandra.
I've tried your code and it works also for me.
Just by curiosity, I've also tried the code from my previous attempts
cols_label(total_length = "Total length (µm)") and it now works.
cols_label(num = md("Total length (µm^2)")) still does not convert ^2 into a superscript,
but cols_label(num = md("Total Length (µm<sup>2</sup>)"))works fine.
May be this was fixed in the recent gt update ?