Learn from R package `flextable` and other table packages

[plpxsk]

For ideas and inspirations, you may consider the R package flextable. I just found it and drop it here for reference

browsing how they do things may inspire your solutions and/or implementations.

http://www.ardata.fr/blog/2018/01/flextable-0-4-0-is-out/

[dgkf]

I've seen flextable pop up a couple times since seeing @pavopax mention it here. I know @waddella has some slightly different objectives (namely introspection of cell values for testing purposes) with rtables, but we should certainly take a serious look at whether those objectives warrant another package. Perhaps we could consider contributing instead to flextable or making interoperability with flextable a goal.

Any thoughts @waddella?

[waddella]

We have now created a number of outputs using rtables and I have been adding features as we needed them. The scope of rtables is still forming. I will document the next release and then we can compare the features/requirements to those of existing table creation/output/tabulation packages.

[waddella]

Hello @pavopax and @dgkf,

rtables has now quite a few features and with the next release we will add the format_sprinf function (thanks @dgkf suggesting that). Also some of the coming features that I plan to add to the projects are documented in the following presentation.

Do you know of any other R project that can create similar tables with the same features (colspans, multi-row header, rtabulate, pagination, etc...)? If yes, lets use this issue to show examples of other R packages that provide more powerful ways to work with tables.

Thanks,
Adrian

[plpxsk]

I recently learned about tableone

[dgkf]

The kableExtra package covers many of the formatting concerns as well. It covers:

• row indents
• grouped rows
• extensible formatting
• multiple output formats
• table footnotes
• pagination via knitr

It might be considerably easier to build a class wrapper around the source data and the (kableExtra or otherwise) export functions than it would be to continue writing yet another table formatting package.

One concession is the column span values. I think it is worth considering contributing that functionality to the kableExtra package instead of reproducing the other functionality in an independent package for that single addition.

[dgkf]

Another one to throw in the mix. This one looks particularly nice for embedding plots as with forest plot-style tables.

https://github.com/htmlwidgets/sparkline

[gmbecker]

Closing as out of date. For discussion of the modern rtables API please start a new issue if desired.