tinytable support

[vincentarelbundock]

Hi @dmurdoch,

This is a draft Pull Request to add a new toTinytable() function. Before I spend more time on this function, I wanted to check in to know if this is something you might be interested in. No pressure at all! It's fine if this is out of scope.

tinytable is a new table-drawing package similar to kableExtra. You can read about it here:

https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

It has the following benefits:

• Zero dependency
• Highly customizable tables.
• Simpler and more consistent user interface.
• Output: LaTeX, HTML, Typst, Word, Markdown, PNG, PDF, Rmarkdown, Quarto
• Builds tables from scratch instead of using complex regular expressions to modify knitr-produced strings. In my opinion, this makes the code base simpler and easier to debug/maintain/expand.

Below, I copy screenshots of a tabular printed to several different formats. I also paste a GIF to showcase the customizability of tinytable objects.

Let me know what you think.

Examples:

tabular to LaTeX

tabular to HTML

tabular to Markdown (pandoc "grid" format)

tabular to Typst

tabular to Word

tinytable showcase

[vincentarelbundock]

---
format: html
---

```{r}
library(tables)
library(tinytable)

f <- Factor(gear) * (mpg + hp + qsec) ~ factor(vs) * (mean + sd) + 1
tab <- tabular(f, data = mtcars)

tab |> toTinytable()
```

[dmurdoch]

I'll have to take a look at the code, but the idea of it isn't out of scope, and it's not a huge function that you've written.

[vincentarelbundock]

Good to hear.

Justification is missing but should be easy to support.

I'm not sure what options can be passed through options.

[vincentarelbundock]

I will ping when a review seems useful. Thanks.

[dmurdoch]

Sounds good. Just some notes:

• it should be a Suggested package, and toTinytable should fail if tinytables can't be loaded.
• I don't use Roxygen in tables. If you want to use it (and you know how to do so for one file), feel free to do so.
• I think the only use of options() is the tables.texify option used in several of the functions, e.g. Factor(), etc. There's also a table_options(), booktabs() and htmloptions() functions which have syntax like options(), but which store options locally.

[vincentarelbundock]

This might be OK now.

I looked at the various options functions and I'm not sure it makes much sense to implement those. It would complicate things, and the whole idea of tinytable is to be output agnostic. I can dive in more if you have specific features you'd like me to implement, but otherwise I'd leave the feature set as is.

I also added a new section to the vignette.

Checks pass and pkgdown website builds on my machine.

[vincentarelbundock]

Well, this is embarrassing. The CI failed because I wrote the wrong version number. Latest commit fixes 0.5.0 -> 0.0.5

[dmurdoch]

Somewhere in the comments you asked whether there was a way to mark HTML so it would display automatically. If you have the htmltools package available, you can use browsable(HTML( someHTML )). The HTML() call marks it as HTML so that tags won't be escaped by other functions, and browsable() signals that it should be treated as a web page when displayed.

I think toTinytable is ready to go now, regardless of whether you implement something like the above. Do you agree?

[vincentarelbundock]

Thanks. I was able to get it to work with browsable(), but I feel that all those checks and extra functions make the examples section messy and hard to read for people who just call ?toTinytable. I'd vote for keeping this as-is, but can make the change if you want the HTML to display on the website.

Otherwise, yes, I think this is ready to go.