r - 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
of 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))