Create a PDF table

Question

Is there a way to produce a PDF of a table from R in the same way you produce a plot (ie with pdf() or ggsave())? I realize there are ways with other programs (using sweave etc.), but I would like to produce it just from R.

Answer 1

Yes there is as you can place text into graphs and hence into pdf devices.

The nicest wrapper for this may be the textplot() function in Greg Warnes' trusted gplots package. Below is the beginning of the examples section of its help page:

# show R version information textplot(version) # show the alphabet as a single string textplot( paste(letters[1:26], collapse=" ") )  # show the alphabet as a matrix  textplot( matrix(letters[1:26], ncol=2))  ### Make a nice 4 way display with two plots and two text summaries  data(iris)   par(mfrow=c(2,2))    plot( Sepal.Length ~ Species, data=iris, border="blue", col="cyan",          main="Boxplot of Sepal Length by Species" )     plotmeans(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data=iris, barwidth=2, connect=FALSE,           main="Means and 95\% Confidence Intervals\nof Sepal Length by Species")  info <- sapply(split(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Species),                function(x) round(c(Mean=mean(x), SD=sd(x), N=gdata::nobs(x)),2))  textplot( info, valign="top"  ) title("Sepal Length by Species")  reg <- lm( Sepal.Length ~ Species, data=iris ) textplot( capture.output(summary(reg)), valign="top") title("Regression of Sepal Length by Species")  par(mfrow=c(1,1))