[R] nice report generator?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11-12-07 5:43 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Richard M. Heiberger<rmh at temple.edu>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Michael,
>>>
>>> that is a challenge.
>>>
>>> I accept it and suggest that it be a contest on the R-help list.
>>>
>>> Please post a pdf file showing some (more than one) tables that you think
>>> look better in Excel than in LaTeX.
>>> I,and probably some others, will send our versions of the tables.
>>>
>>> I think a new email thread with an appropriate catchy title would be the
>>> way to do it.
>>
>>
>> The problem is that its drop dead easy in Excel but its not readily
>> accessible in R and latex (as opposed to the problem being raw
>> capability). Simply exhibiting how to do it is not enough.  What is
>> needed is a function, accessible from CRAN, with a bunch of built in
>> themes that are easy to apply:
>>
>> latex(DF, theme = "cherry orchard")
>>
>>
>
> I don't believe you.  Show us some examples.
>

As I mentioned, its not just a matter of replicating the output. Its a
matter of how easy it is to generate it.  With Excel 2007 enter a
table into the cells, select it and on the Home tab in the Styles
group of the ribbon click on Format a Table.  Select any of the
templates that are presented and that's it.

I have produced quite fancy tables with R and latex beyond what the
above instructions could do in Excel but I did not regard that effort
as easy although it did produce very nice looking tables.

There is a new tables package that just appeared on CRAN in the last
few days.  I haven't seriously used it yet but perhaps it has some of
these capabilities (or if not will evolve into providing not only the
tabular content but also the presentation aspects that are important
to some users) or perhaps some other CRAN package has already gone in
this direction.

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