[R] ftable (accidentally?) increases column widths

[Marius Hofert]

Dear expeRts,

I typically replace NA (but also other) entries in an ftable by a character string containing LaTeX code for later use. I realized that replacing an entry in one column also affects other columns; they are displayed all with the same column width. Since the character string can be long, this is a bit annoying. Is there any way to prevent this so that there are individual column widths?
Maybe one can use "..." to tell ftable to use individual column widths? 

Minimal example:

(ft <- ftable(Titanic))
ft[1,2] <- "***************************************"
ft

Cheers,

Marius