r - Stargazer output appears below text - rmarkdown to pdf

Question

The Problem

When using rmarkdown in RStudio, my stargazer(glm()) output gets positioned below the text that I would like it to. It gets positioned in a different spot than the r chunk is.

The PDF is created perfectly, it's just the position of the stargazer output that is a problem.

Background

I am trying to create a PDF with lots of text and a couple of stargazer glm() output between a few of the paragraphs. When I put more than one stargazer() output in my rmarkdown file and then "Knit" to PDF, the stargazer() output gets moved down below the text.

I would like the stargazer output to get positioned where I put the r chunks.

I do not have the same problem when using inserting ggplot2() output in a similar manner.

Failed Attempts

I have tried as many combinations as I know how of positioning my r chunks arguments. (Just in case)

I have tried every combination of tab vs. spaces, before and after paragraphs/headers/r-chunks/etc. (That was a problem I had once with ggplot2 output)

I have referenced the following StackOverflow Questions:

• Using fig.pos = "H" and fig.pos = "h"
• This very similar question
• Yihui Xie's examples
• Stargazer and RStudio
• I tried using "" at the end of (and between) chunks as mentioned in one of the above posts.

Reproducible Example

A reproducible example of my work problem:

---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Me"
output: pdf_document
---

```{r setup, echo = FALSE}
library(stargazer)

mtcars_glm <- glm(formula = vs ~ disp + am + cyl + mpg, family = "binomial", data = mtcars)

```

# Heading1

I have tried creating paragraphs like this.

    I have also tried creating paragraphs with 2 indents.

## Heading2

Lets try to create a couple of nice tables with stargazer.

```{r attempt1, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}

stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), header = FALSE)

```

And then we will add some text down here, too.

```{r attempt2, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}

stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), header = FALSE)

```

And some more text.

```{r attempt3, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}

stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), header = FALSE)

```

Lets see what happens.

### Heading3

```{r plot_attempt}

boxplot(mtcars$mpg ~ mtcars$cyl)
```

# Second Section

## Second Header

Here are the 3 pages of output:

Page #1

Page #2

Page #3

Here is my sessionInfo:

R version 3.4.4 (2018-03-15)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] stargazer_5.2.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] compiler_3.4.4  backports_1.1.2 magrittr_1.5    rprojroot_1.3-2 htmltools_0.3.6 tools_3.4.4     yaml_2.1.19     Rcpp_0.12.16    stringi_1.1.7   rmarkdown_1.9  
[11] knitr_1.20      stringr_1.3.0   digest_0.6.15   evaluate_0.10.1

Thanks

If you can help me, thanks. I do not know much about LaTeX or Pandoc, so I imagine it is some sort of knowledge gap. Feel free just to point me in the right direction, too, if you think you've found a solution.

I appreciate it.

Answer 1

If you set float = FALSE, you will not have any of the features that come with a floating environment, such as captions (i.e. the title) or labels. Instead, consider setting an unconditional table placement with the float package. As an example, consider the following document (I use clearpage to start the body on page 2 so we can see the adjoining pages on the screenshot):

---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Me"
header-includes:
   - usepackage{lipsum}
output: pdf_document
---
clearpage
lipsum[1]
```{r setup, echo = FALSE, include = FALSE}
library(stargazer)
mtcars_glm <- glm(formula = vs ~ disp + am + cyl + mpg, family = "binomial", data = mtcars)
```

Table 1 here.
```{r tab1, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), 
          header = FALSE, title = "Table 1")
```

lipsum[2-3]
Table 2 here.
```{r tab2, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), 
          header = FALSE, title = "Table 2")
```

lipsum[4]

which gives

where Table 2 has been bumped to the following page, and the text after Table 2 has been moved up. This is how LaTeX behaves; it does not want to leave too much white space at the bottom of the page. To insist that Table 2 follows a piece of text, you can use the H specifier (which requires the float LaTeX package). Here's the same document, but note the table.placement argument in the tab2 chunk:

---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Me"
header-includes:
   - usepackage{float}
   - usepackage{lipsum}
output: pdf_document
---
clearpage
lipsum[1]
```{r setup, echo = FALSE, include = FALSE}
library(stargazer)
mtcars_glm <- glm(formula = vs ~ disp + am + cyl + mpg, family = "binomial", data = mtcars)
```

Table 1 here.
```{r tab1, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), 
          header = FALSE, title = "Table 1")
```

lipsum[2-3]
Table 2 here.
```{r tab2, results = 'asis', echo = FALSE}
stargazer(mtcars_glm, ci=FALSE, no.space = TRUE, report = c("vc*"), 
          header = FALSE, title = "Table 2", table.placement = "H")
```

lipsum[4]

which gives

The table is placed after the text ("Table 2 here"), even at the expense of leaving white space at the bottom of the page. An alternative is FloatBarrier from the placeins package; see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/19766/how-to-control-the-position-of-floating-images.

In general, you should leave float (i.e. tables and figures) placements to LaTeX. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39017/how-to-influence-the-position-of-float-environments-like-figure-and-table-in-lat for an extensive discussion.