Cross-referenced longtable caption repeated on page break

[mcanouil]

Quarto injects the \caption and \label into the longtable, but places them before \endhead without adding a separate \endfirsthead block. This causes the caption to repeat on every page.

Discussed in https://github.com/orgs/quarto-dev/discussions/14145

^{Originally posted by jtatria March 3, 2026}

Description

I'm trying t format a very long table with repeated headers in each page using gt with latex options longtable and header_repeat, but I'm getting repeated table captions on each page, and multiple entries in the list of tables.

How can I accomplish a long table with repeated headers but a single caption?

I already tried using gt's own gt:tab_caption, but the caption wouldn't show in quarto.

MRE:

---
title: "gt demo"
format:
  pdf:
    documentclass: report
    lot: true
---

## Demo

```{r}
#| label: tbl-demo
#| tbl-cap: "Caption repeats"
	gt::gt( iris ) |> gt::tab_options(
		latex.use_longtable=TRUE,
		latex.header_repeat=TRUE
	)
```
```

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[cderv]

Possibly related to this

• How do I suppress redundant lot (list of table) entries in quarto book pdf output? #11890

[cscheid]

The repeated caption is intentional (it's a longtable feature that people want). I'm not sure what we could do to control that, but this isn't an accident.

[jtatria]

Thanks for your attention to this.

In that case, what would currently be the correct way of accomplishing a longtable with repeated headers but prevent duplicate entries in the LOT?

[cscheid]

I'm honestly not sure! If there is an accepted, pure-latex way to accomplish this such that repeated captions show up in the document but not in the LOT, then we should turn the issue into a bug and fix it. Do you happen to know either way?

[jtatria]

Google's AI results produce this latex snippet:

\usepackage{longtable}

\begin{document}

\listoftables % List of tables will only show this once
\clearpage

\begin{longtable}{|c|c|}
    % --- Caption and header for the FIRST page ---
    \caption{My Long Table Caption} \label{tab:long} \\
    \hline
    \textbf{Header 1} & \textbf{Header 2} \\
    \hline
    \endfirsthead

    % --- Caption and header for SUBSEQUENT pages ---
    \caption[]{My Long Table Caption (Continued)} \\
    \hline
    \textbf{Header 1} & \textbf{Header 2} \\
    \hline
    \endhead

    % --- Footer ---
    \hline
    \multicolumn{2}{r@{}}{Continued on next page...} \\
    \endfoot

    % --- Last Footer ---
    \hline
    \endlastfoot

    % --- Table Data ---
    Data A1 & Data A2 \\
    Data B1 & Data B2 \\
    % ... add enough rows to break pages ...
    Data Z1 & Data Z2 \\
\end{longtable}

\end{document}

i.e. include the first caption before \endfirstheader to serve as LOT anchor, and then include subsequent \captions with empty options (\caption[]{}) to suppress cross-references and LOT before \endhead.

This also allows the nice side benefit of being able to differentiate subsequent captions e.g. to add (Continued) as in the example, etc.