r - Automatically adjust LaTeX table width to fit pdf using knitr and Rstudio

Question

Using Rstudio and knitr to produce latex-tables in pdf, how do I make wide tables fit the page? I'm basically looking for at way to shrink the tables.

With figures, it is really easy in Knitr using out.width=, but with tables I can't seem find a way to do it.

Any suggestions?

documentclass{article}

egin{document}

The following tables are too wide to fit the pdf. I hope there is a simple way to shrink them to fit. In this example I've used tables generated from the xtable(), stargazer() and latex() functions.

<<message=FALSE>>=
library(xtable)
library(stargazer)
library(Hmisc)
library(tables)
wide.df <- cbind(iris[1:10,],iris[1:10,],iris[1:10,])

@



<<results='asis'>>=
xtable(wide.df)
@


<<results='asis'>>=
stargazer(wide.df,summary=FALSE)
@


<<results='asis'>>=
latex( tabular( Species ~  (Sepal.Length +Sepal.Length +  Sepal.Width +   Petal.Length  +  Petal.Width  )*(mean + sd + mean + mean )          , data=iris)            )

@




end{document}

Following Stat-R's suggestions I've tried to use resizebox but can't get it to work:

documentclass{article}
usepackage{graphicx}
egin{document}

I've tried to use reshapebox but I am really clueless on how to get it to work in Rstudio/knitr:

<<message=FALSE>>=
library(xtable)
wide.df <- cbind(iris[1:10,],iris[1:10,],iris[1:10,])
@


esizebox{0.75extwidth}{!}{%
<<results='asis'>>=
xtable(wide.df)
@
%}

end{document}

I get this error:

! File ended while scanning use of Gscale@box@dd.


sessioninfo()

R version 3.0.0 (2013-04-03)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Danish_Denmark.1252  LC_CTYPE=Danish_Denmark.1252    LC_MONETARY=Danish_Denmark.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                   
[5] LC_TIME=Danish_Denmark.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] splines   grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] tables_0.7      Hmisc_3.10-1    survival_2.37-4 stargazer_3.0.1 pgirmess_1.5.7  splancs_2.01-32 spdep_0.5-56    coda_0.16-1     deldir_0.0-22  
[10] maptools_0.8-23 foreign_0.8-53  MASS_7.3-26     Matrix_1.0-12   lattice_0.20-15 rgdal_0.8-9     sp_1.0-9        nlme_3.1-109    boot_1.3-9     
[19] xtable_1.7-1    scales_0.2.3    plyr_1.8        reshape2_1.2.2  ggplot2_0.9.3.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] cluster_1.14.4     colorspace_1.2-2   dichromat_2.0-0    digest_0.6.3       evaluate_0.4.3     formatR_0.7        gtable_0.1.2       knitr_1.2         
 [9] labeling_0.1       LearnBayes_2.12    munsell_0.4        proto_0.3-10       RColorBrewer_1.0-5 stringr_0.6.2      tools_3.0.0 

Answer 1

You can pass a scalebox argument to print.xtable like so

<<results='asis'>>=
print(xtable(wide.df), scalebox='0.75')
@

That doesn't automatically resize the table to fit the page (unfortunately xtable doesn't support a resizebox argument) but for many applications the above might be good enough.

The problem with your code is that xtable returns the table wrapped in a table environment and not just a tabular. What you have to wrap in the resizebox, however, is the tabular. The only way I can see to get this to work as you want it is to let xtable return only the tabular, like so:

egin{table}

esizebox{extwidth}{!} {
<<results='asis'>>=
print(xtable(wide.df), floating=FALSE)
@
}
end{table}

and then to write the LaTeX code around it manually.