colortable

Seamlessly style and print your vectors across Rmarkdown output types through a single interface. colortable enables users to style and color the contents of their vectors, data.frames, and tibbles through the object, and function, color_vctr().

At this point, the supported output types include:

Installation

Currently {colortable} is only available on github, and is very much under development.

remotes::install_github("thebioengineer/colortable")
## install.packages("colortable") ## Not Available on CRAN

Getting Started

{colortable} works by making a special S3 class called a color_vctr, and custom print/format functions.

It then has 4 arguments; - The vector to be styled - text_color, a vector that is either the color the entire vector to be colored or each element - style, a vector is either the style the enture vector to be styled with or each element - background, a vector that is either the background color the entire vector to be colored or for each element.

Additionally, there is a few helper functions - set_styling() uses a boolean argument to apply the styling - color_scale() is to be used for setting colors, accepting a pallette

A note, html styling does not apply in a github readme

library(colortable)
#> Registered S3 methods overwritten by 'colortable':
#>   method                from     
#>   knit_print.data.frame rmarkdown
#>   print.data.frame      base

color_vctr(c(1,2,3,4),
           text_color = c("blue","green", "yellow",NA),
           style = c("underline","italic",NA,"bold"),
           background = c(NA,NA,"blue",NA))

## [1] 1 2 3 4 

color_vctr(LETTERS, text_color = color_scale(colorRamp(c("red","yellow"))))

## [1] A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 

color_vctr(LETTERS, text_color = color_scale("Blues"))

## [1] A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 

Example

A common case I have seen for coloring values is from analysis coloring p-values. Normally, when I have seen this the color is hard-coded in an ifelse statement with a paste0. However, this liits the output to a single type.

The benefit of {{colortable}} is that the same code can be used across outputs and even in the console!

library(tidyverse)
library(knitr)

## Super Great analysis of mtcars!

lm_fit <- lm(mpg ~ ., mtcars)

a_lm_fit <- anova(lm_fit)

tbl_anova <- a_lm_fit %>% 
  as_tibble()%>% 
  mutate(
    Coef     = rownames(a_lm_fit),
    `Pr(>F)` = set_styling(`Pr(>F)`, `Pr(>F)` < 0.05, background = "green", style = "underline"),
    `Pr(>F)` = set_styling(`Pr(>F)`, is.na(`Pr(>F)`), style = "strikethrough", text_color = "silver"),
    `F value` = set_styling(`F value`, is.na(`F value`), style = "strikethrough", text_color = "silver")
  ) %>% 
  select(Coef, everything())

kable(tbl_anova, escape = FALSE)

Output types

In order to simply generate a color_vctr, use the color_vctr function. It can convert any atomic (numeric, integer, complex, character, logical, raw) into a color_vctr where text and background colors, and styles can be set.

To see the available styles and colors, use the valid_* family of functions: valid_colors()or valid_style(). To check whether the styling is a valid type for the output, set the method to be “latex” for pdf outputs, or “html” for html outputs.

Below is a random sampling of output types to the console:

data.frame(
  text_color = sample(c(NA, valid_text_color()),10, replace = TRUE),
  background = sample(c(NA, valid_background()),10, replace = TRUE),
  style      = sample(c(NA, valid_style()),10, replace = TRUE),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
  ) %>% 
  mutate(
    background = ifelse(text_color == background, 
                  sample(c(NA, valid_background()),10, replace = TRUE),
                  background)
  ) %>% 
  mutate(
  example = color_vctr(runif(10),
                       text_color = text_color,
                       background = background,
                       style = style)
  )

Inspiration

This idea was inspired by crayon, and has some elements based on it. I thank all the developers of that project! Since then, I have been insprired by ‘flextable’ for word development.

Current styling technologies such as {kableExtra} and {formattable} also inspired the development of this project.

COC

Please note that the ‘colortable’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.