The motivation behind lazyWeave
was to reproducible
reports among those R users who hadn’t yet learned LaTeX. It was, in my
opinion, a noble goal, but happened to coincide with the wiser efforts
behind the development of the knitr
and
rmarkdown
packages. The development of these tools, which
have become so common in the R community, have rendered most of the
functionality of lazyWeave
obsolete.
So at this point, we may ask, “why lazyWeave
at all?”
There are a handful of functions that I find quite useful still, and
they can still be used in the rmarkdown
documents. The
functions you’ll likely find most useful are:
lazy.matrix
lazy.table
cattable
conttable
catconttable
univ
All of these functions are capable of producing output in LaTeX, HTML, and RMarkdown.
lazyWeave
is somewhat similar to the xtable
package. What are the advantages of lazyWeave
? To be
honest, there really aren’t a lot. In fact, xtable
has
quite a few more bells and whistles than lazy.matrix
. For
instance, with xtable
you can turn column headings
sideways, or use the longtable
package in
LaTeX
. Eventually, I may add support for these
features.
The only advantage lazy.matrix
has over
xtable
is the ability to apply colors to the background of
table rows.
The other advantage over xtable
is the ability to define
multicolumn cells (in LaTeX and HTML only) when building custom tables
with lazy.table
.
Beyond those basics, cattable
, conttable
,
catconttable
, and univ
provide ready-made
functionality for basic summaries with univariable comparisons. In fact,
you may find that they are generally publication ready out of the
box.