[FR] Two-column layout for .docx files

[tvqt]

This was discussed in a StackOverflow question:

I am knitting from RMarkdown to .docx using bookdown::word_document2 as the output format. I want to have a section in my document that features two columns. Is this possible?

I know this is possible with the officedown::rdocx_document output format, but I cannot use that due to other limitations (it will not allow me to have a different first page header).

EDIT: please note my question is specifically about Word (bookdown::word_document2) output. The multi-column layout instructions in the Bookdown documentation are for HTML and PDF output types, so do not apply to my use case.

I thought I'd post it here because it sounds like a feature request. I guess the user could potentially use pandoc to convert the PDF, though I wonder how accurate the resulting .docx file would be...

Apologies if this is already implemented!

[cderv]

Thanks for the feature request. Probably more of a rmarkdown feature request than bookdown.

This is indeed not possible. The column syntax is from Pandoc and does not work for docx AFAIK. officedown is a tool that leverage officer I believe to bring better docx support.