Prework

• Read and abide by the great_tables code of conduct and contributing guidelines.
• Search for duplicates among the existing issues (both open and closed).

Proposal

I'm trying to load pre-computed gt tables in Quarto files using pickling. Unfortunately, unpickling doesn't work

from great_tables import GT
from great_tables.data import islands
import pickle
islands_mini = islands.head(10)
gt_tbl = GT(islands_mini)

with open("gt.pkl", "wb") as f:
    pickle.dump(gt_tbl, f)

with open("gt.pkl", "rb") as f:
    gt_tbl2 = pickle.load(f)

gives me

TypeError: Boxhead.__new__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'data'
Cell In[42], line 11
      8     pickle.dump(gt_tbl, f)
     10 with open("gt.pkl", "rb") as f:
---> 11     gt_tbl2 = pickle.load(f)

It seems that supporting unpickling would require and additional method on the GT side: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37753992