The gt Package: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The gt package is table preparation package for R which makes the presentation of tabular data fairly easy and also has power to customize tables should you need it. The package has been in continuous development at RStudio for over three years and so it’s now a good time to reflect on what’s been done, where we are at, and how we can make this package and table publication even better in the future. I’ll provide some background and insight on the decisions made when starting the gt project. We’ll go over what gt is capable of doing today. It’s indeed a very useful package at this point in time and I’d like to talk about some of the features that make it great. I’ll provide some examples of tables that can be made right now. We want to make even more investments in table generation tooling so, to this end, we are working on a new project that aims to make table rendering easier through software that focuses entirely on rendering (i.e., writing to HTML, LaTeX, and RTF) an intermediate representation (IR) of a table. By doing this, authors of table packages won’t have to focus on writing code that renders tables to different formats. Instead, the authors of Pharma-focused table packages could concentrate their efforts on making their APIs even better.

Publication
Presented at 2021 Conference

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