tinytable
is a small but powerful R
package
to draw beautiful tables in a variety of formats: HTML, LaTeX, Word,
PDF, PNG, Markdown, and Typst. The user interface is minimalist and easy
to learn, while giving users access to powerful frameworks to create
endlessly customizable tables.
https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/
There are already many excellent table-drawing packages in the
R
ecosystem. Why release a new one? As the maintainer of
modelsummary
, I needed a table-drawing package which
was:
R
package.[2]To achieve these goals, the design philosophy of
tinytable
rests on three pillars:
Data is separate from style. The code that this package
creates keeps the content of a table separate from the style sheet that
applies to its cells. This is in contrast to other R
packages that modify the actual text in each cell to style it. Keeping
data and style separate allows tinytable
to create
human-readable files which are easy to edit, debug, and extend. It also
enables developers to keep a simpler code base, with minimal use of
messy regular expressions.
Flexibility. Users’ needs are extremely varied, and a
table-drawing package must be flexible enough to accomodate different
ideas. To achieve this, tinytable
builds on battle-tested
and versatile frameworks like Bootstrap
for HTML and
tabularray
for LaTeX.
Lightweight is the right
weight. Some of the most popular table-drawing packages in the
R
ecosystem are very heavy: A single library()
call can sometimes load upwards of 65 R
packages. In
contrast, tinytable
imports zero 3rd party R
package by default.
tinytable
is a relatively new package with rapid
development. If you want to benefit from the latest features—showcased
on the package website—you should install from R-Universe:
install.packages("tinytable", repos = "https://vincentarelbundock.r-universe.dev")
Alternatively, you can install it from CRAN:
install.packages("tinytable")
Restart R
completely for the installation to take
effect.
The best feature of tinytable
is its simplicity. To draw
a table, simply call the tt()
function with your data frame
as the first argument:
library(tinytable)
<- mtcars[1:5, 1:5]
x
tt(x)
More complex tables can be created by calling arguments and chaining functions together. In the next example, we add a caption, footnote, colors, styles, and spanning column headers:
<- "A simple \\texttt{tinytable} example."
cap <- "Nullam odio est, ullamcorper scelerisque lectus a, eleifend luctus nisl. Etiam ullamcorper, nibh vel interdum auctor, odio nulla mollis tortor, vel fringilla ante quam quis est."
not
tt(x,
caption = cap,
notes = not,
width = .5) |>
style_tt(
i = 1:3,
j = 1:2,
background = "teal",
color = "white",
bold = TRUE) |>
group_tt(
j = list("Halloumi" = 1:2, "Tofu" = 4:5))
The tinytable
0.3.0.34 tutorial will take you much
further. It is available in two formats:
[1] Other formats like Markdown and Typst are also available, but less flexible.
[2] Some extra packages can be imported to access specific
functionality, such as integration with Quarto, inserting
ggplot2
objects as inline plots, and saving tables to PNG
images or PDF documents.