title: R markdown: simplify creating tables of figures and text
body: <p>For R markdown <code>Rmd</code> web pages I want to generate tables containing in the first column thumbnail images (that link to a larger image or a web site) and
  descriptive text in the 2nd column.  One example is the following image:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mG4Yv.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/mG4Yv.png" alt="example image"></a></p>
  
  <p>I know I can create this manually in raw HTML, but that is very fiddly and time-consuming.  There must be some easier way.</p>
  
  <p>On a different page, I tried a markdown / pandoc table, but that didn't work, and I reverted to manual coding of HTML</p>
  
  <pre><code>icon                                              | title
  --------------------------------------------------+--------------------------
  &lt;img src="images/books/R-Graphics.jpg" height=50&gt; |Paul Murrell, *R Graphics*, 2nd Ed.
  &lt;img src="images/books/R-graphics-cookbook.jpg" height=50&gt; | Winston Chang, R Graphics Cookbook
  &lt;img src="images/books/lattice.png" height=50&gt; | Deepayan Sarkar, *lattice*
  &lt;img src="images/books/ggplot2.jpg" height=50&gt; | Hadley Wickham, *ggplot2*
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Perhaps the <code>htmltools</code> package would be useful here, but I can't quite see how to use it in my <code>Rmd</code> files for this application.</p>