Adding a cross reference to a markdown table results in column alignment being ignored in docx output

Bug description

When generating docx output, if I specify a markdown table with column alignments then adding a cross reference to that table results in the column alignments being ignored in the generated docx file.

Steps to reproduce

Here's a test Quarto document

---
title: "Test table column alignment with cross reference"
format:
  docx:
    keep-md: true
  html:
    embed-resources: true
  pdf: default
engine: knitr
---

A test table with correct column alignment. Taken from [here](https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/tables.html#markdown-tables).

| Default | Left | Right | Center |
|---------|:-----|------:|:------:|
| 12      | 12   |    12 |   12   |
| 123     | 123  |   123 |  123   |
| 1       | 1    |     1 |   1    |

: Demonstration of pipe table syntax

Now I add @tbl-example, which has includes cross reference. In docx output the column alignment is not adhered to.

| Default | Left | Right | Center |
|---------|:-----|------:|:------:|
| 12      | 12   |    12 |   12   |
| 123     | 123  |   123 |  123   |
| 1       | 1    |     1 |   1    |

: Demonstration of pipe table syntax {#tbl-example}

Now I add @tbl-another, which includes the cross reference using the div syntax. Again in docx output the column alignment is not adhered to.

::: {#tbl-another}

| Default | Left | Right | Center |
|---------|:-----|------:|:------:|
| 12      | 12   |    12 |   12   |
| 123     | 123  |   123 |  123   |
| 1       | 1    |     1 |   1    |

: Demonstration of pipe table syntax

:::

The bug is that column alignments are ignored for tables 2 and 3 in docx output, and all columns are centred.

Whereas the html and pdf outputs use the specified alignments.

and

I am not 100% sure whether this a Quarto bug or a Pandoc bug. My guess is that it's a Quarto bug, since if I run the intermediate markdown file through pandoc, the tables use the specified column alignment. Also the column alignments are respected under both pandoc-crossref and bookdown::word_document2().

If helpful, my test repo is https://github.com/remlapmot/quarto-docx-tables-test.

Expected behavior

The column alignments (e.g., left or right) should be respected.

Actual behavior

All the columns are centred.

Your environment

RStudio 2023.12.1+402 "Ocean Storm" Release (4da58325ffcff29d157d9264087d4b1ab27f7204, 2024-01-29) for macOS
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) RStudio/2023.12.1+402 Chrome/116.0.5845.190 Electron/26.2.4 Safari/537.36

macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

Quarto check output

$ quarto check
Quarto 1.4.550
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.1.11: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.69.5: OK
      Deno version 1.37.2: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.4.550
      Path: /Applications/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: (external install)
      Chromium: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: TinyTex
      Path: /Users/tom/Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin
      Version: 2023

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.12.2
      Path: /opt/homebrew/opt/python@3.12/bin/python3.12
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with python3 -m pip install jupyter

[✓] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.3.3
      Path: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources
      LibPaths:
        - /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/library
      knitr: 1.45
      rmarkdown: 2.25

[✓] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

Reproduce the issue with the Quarto document and test repository described in the report, rendering to docx with and without the table cross references. Compare the intermediate markdown and the Pandoc-generated output to narrow down where alignment metadata is lost. Done means the docx output preserves the declared left, right, center, and default alignments for all three tables.