Presentation-Quality Tables, Displayed Using ggplot2

tablesgg is an R package that displays presentation-quality tables as plots on an R graphics device. Although there are other packages that format tables for display, this package is unique in combining two features:

• It is aware of the logical structure of the table being presented, and makes use of that for automatic layout and styling of the table. This avoids the need for most manual adjustments to achieve an attractive result.

• It displays tables using ggplot2 graphics. Therefore a table can be presented anywhere a graph could be, with no more effort. External software such as LaTeX or HTML or their viewers is not required.

Methods are included to display matrices; data frames; tables created by R’s ftable(), table(), and xtabs() functions; and tables created by the tables and xtable packages. Methods can be added to display other table-like objects.

Other package features:

• A full set of tools is provided to control the appearance of tables, including titles, footnotes and reference marks, horizontal and vertical rules, and spacing of rows and columns. Many properties can be set automatically by specifying styles. Default styles are included, and the user can define custom styles.

• There are tools for low-level manipulation of the appearance of individual table elements if desired.

• All sizes and dimensions in displayed tables are specified in physical units (points for font size, millimeters for everything else). Therefore a plotted table has a well-defined physical size, independent of the size of the graphics device on which it is displayed. The user can easily increase or decrease the displayed size by a scale factor, maintaining the relative proportions of table elements.

• Since the plotted tables are ordinary ggplot objects, the facilities of ggplot2 and its various extension packages are available to modify or manipulate the table. For example, the table can be inserted as an image within another plot.

A vignette is included that illustrates usage and options available in the package.