General guide for creating publication quality tables using R, Sweave, and LaTeX

Beyond the high level issues of specifying the desired table format, there are issues of implementation.

When should a helper function such as xtable be used?
Which helper function should be used in a given situation?
How can the default output of helper functions be customised to particular requirements?

Question

It seems to me that the above issues are deserving of a detailed textbook-style introduction.

Are there any online or offline resources that provide a detailed overview of how to produce publication quality tables using R, Sweave, and LaTeX, and that address the issues discussed above?

asked Mar 12, 2012 at 0:29 Jeromy Anglim Jeromy Anglim 34.7k 31 31 gold badges 117 117 silver badges 175 175 bronze badges

I would add knitr to the list. It seems to solve a lot of the integration issues with Sweave and cacheing and tikz. But good q.

Commented Mar 12, 2012 at 2:32

in fact I had the similar question a few months back as well: github.com/yihui/knitr/issues/53 I'm eager to see how other people answer it. For me, I almost always avoid tables. when I have to use tables, I almost always use xtable .

Commented Mar 12, 2012 at 3:31

I personnaly find Hmisc 's latex function more flexible than xtable . The Booktabs (to fine-tune the spaces) and Datatool (to read CSV files) LaTeX packages may also be useful.

Commented Mar 12, 2012 at 7:32

I find latex from Hmisc far too complicated. Everything that I generally need to be able to do is done in print.xtable() and xtable() . If you're creating something for publication, you are ALWAYS going to have to massage anything that's generated automatically. You can create wrapper functions for xtable, print.xtable and latex that suit particular situations.

Commented Mar 12, 2012 at 18:29 You might have better luck asking at tex.stackexchange.com Commented Apr 6, 2012 at 12:29

5 Answers 5

Just to tie this up with a nice little bow at the time of current writing, the best existant tutorials on publication-quality tables and usage scenarios appear to be an amalgamation of these documents:

A Sweave example (source)
The Joy of Sweave: A Beginner's Guide to Reproducible Research with Sweave (source)
Latex and R via Sweave: An example document how to use Sweave (source)
Sweave = R · LaTeX 2 (source)
The xtable gallery (source)
The Sweave Homepage
LaTeX documentation

Going beyond the scope of what currently exists, you may want to ask the author of The Joy of Sweave for a document on publication-quality tables specifically. It seems like he's gone above and beyond this problem in his research. In addition to the questions you've raised, this space specifically could use a style guide that, flatly, does not currently exist.