title: How to italicize text in a selected rows in one column in table using kable?
body: <p>I am trying to make a report in a LaTeX format using R. The file format is in <code>.Rnw</code>. I am preparing a table using the kable and kableExtra packages but I have only one problem.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the screenshot of the table I made:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/FLLHf.png" alt="table in kable"></p>
  
  <p>I wanted to make the two species (in rows 1 and 2 of column 1) to be in italics. How to make it?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the data:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df1 &lt;- data.frame(`Species Name` = c("Encrasicholina punctifer", "Stolephorus indicus", "Others", "Total"),
                    `2014` = c(171.12, 0, 0.59, 171.72),
                    `2015` = c(231.18, 3.07, 0.29, 234.55),
                    `2016` = c(412.1, 0, 0.44, 412.54),
                    Total = c(814.4, 3.07, 1.33, 818.8),
                    Percent = c(99.46, 0.38, 0.16, 100))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>By the way, here's the R code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\begin{table}[H]
  \centering
  &lt;&lt;table_2&gt;&gt;=
  df1 %&gt;% 
    kable(format = "latex", 
          booktabs = T) %&gt;%
    kable_styling(latex_options = c("HOLD_position"),
                  position = "center",
                  font_size = 9) %&gt;% 
    row_spec(0, bold = T) %&gt;% 
    row_spec(4, bold = T)
  @
  \end{table}
  </code></pre>