Rmarkdown setting the position of kable

Question

I have the following issue, once knitting the Rmarkdown in Rstudio to PDF, my tables appear not in the position where they are in Rmarkdown file, but on the top of the page. I tried to add:

header-includes:
  - \usepackage{float}

and

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(... fig.pos = "H")
```

But it didn't work. R and Rstudio run on Linux, the LaTeX engine is "pdflatex"

Fully reproducible example:

---
title: "Untitled"
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
  - \usepackage{float}
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE, message=FALSE, warning = FALSE, fig.align = "center", dev = "cairo_pdf", fig.pos = "H")
```

```{r}
library(kableExtra)
library(tidyverse)
```
## R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

\newpage

## Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

```{r pressure, echo=FALSE}
plot(pressure)
```

Note that the `echo = FALSE` parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.

```{r}    
kable(cars %>% filter(cars$speed>=23), caption = "Speed vs distance")
```

Answer 1

To fix the table position in your latex document, you don't need include header options nor set opts_chunk configs. To do that you should specify the latex_options as hold_position by adding the kable_styling() function in the kable [1].

So the last chunk will be:

```{r}    
kable(cars %>% filter(cars$speed>=23), caption = "Speed vs distance") %>%
  kable_styling(latex_options = "hold_position")
```