title: Change bits of text specification / fontface (bold, italic,...) in a kableExtra table cell
body: <p>I'm trying to format individual bits of text in a kableExtra table in rmakrdown, such as the example below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>---
  output: pdf_document
  ---
  ```{r, echo=FALSE}
  knitr::kable(data.frame(char = c('Hey *italics*','Hello **bold**', 'Hi ~~strikethrough~~~'),
               num = c(1,2,3)))
  ```
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8PM5S.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8PM5S.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>However, if I use kableExtra</p>
  
  <pre><code>```{r, echo=FALSE}
  library(kableExtra)
  knitr::kable(data.frame(char = c('Hey *italics*','Hello **bold**', 'Hi ~~strikethrough~~~'),
               num = c(1,2,3)))
  ```
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'll get:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aysgw.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aysgw.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>I know there is <code>cell_spec, row_spec and column_spec</code> to format entire rows columns and cells, but that's not what I want. </p>
  
  <p>I want to <strong>format only part of the text in a certain cell, but keep all functions from kableExtra</strong> for designing my table. There is also <code>text_spec()</code>, but I did not find any example on how to use it within a table. </p>
  
  <p>P.S. I'm not that advanced and therefor would prefer working examples. </p>