How should table captions be positioned?

[jolars]

In Pandoc, table captions can be placed both above and below a table. How should Panache normalize table captions? Right now, we preserve the table position.

Above

  Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax.

    Right     Left     Center     Default
  -------     ------ ----------   -------
       12     12        12            12
      123     123       123          123
        1     1          1             1

Possible Motivation For

• This is the way I've been generally taught is that table captions are placed, because that is the natural way to read them: from top to bottom.
• Pandoc's LaTeX and HTML writers place the caption above the table, so placing above is consistent with the Markdown philosophy of aligning the markdown code with the output.

Below

    Right     Left     Center     Default
  -------     ------ ----------   -------
       12     12        12            12
      123     123       123          123
        1     1          1             1

  Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax.

Possible Motivation For

• Consistency with figure captions
• Pandoc's Markdown writer normalized tables to come below

Preserve User Placement

User whatever the user chooses.

Possible Motvation For

• Users get the freedom to decide what they feel is best.
• This is also simpler programmatically, but I don't think that's a good argument and we already have AST wrappers for handling table logic anyway.
• This might possible help avoid some weirdness with changing syntactic meaning when moving the caption.

[jolars]

I just realized that we actually do normalize for multiline tables, but only for those...

[hadley]

I like below, because it's consistent with figures.

[jolars]

I went with positioning them above in the end (40fe2b0). I am not completely against introducing a configuration option later on for setting above or below, however, if there is enough want for it. In that case please feel free to open another discussion or issue.

[jolars]

I actually just realized that Pandoc prioritzes captions below. In this snippet, the caption gets attached to the first table:

  | A | B |
  | - | - |
  | 1 | 2 |

  : (#tab:quoting-base) base R quoting functions

  | C | D |
  | - | - |
  | 3 | 4 |

So I think I may need to revert and switch to normalizing below anyway.

[jolars]

As of 7d38d60, we are now placing captions after tables.