reporter {reporter}

reporter: A package for creating statistical reports

Description

The reporter package creates statistical reports in TXT, RTF, PDF, HTML, and DOCX file formats. Features include automatic page wrapping and breaking for wide and long tables, spanning headers, titles, footnotes, page headers, page footers, and page numbering. The package allows mixing of multiple tables, text, and plots in a single report, or even on a single page.

Details

The reporter package creates regulatory-style, statistical reports. It was designed to create tables, listings, and figures (TLFs) for use in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device industries. However, the functions are generalized enough to provide statistical reporting for any industry. The package is written primarily in Base R, and has few dependencies on other packages.

The package is intended to give R programmers flexible report layout capabilities, and a choice of output formats. The package will initially focus on printable, file-based output formats, as there are already numerous R packages that provide tabular reporting in HTML.

PDF output may have limitations not associated with other output types. See NotesOnPDF for more information.

Key Features

The reporter package contains the following key features:

• Titles, footnotes, page header, and page footer are repeated on each page

• Supports header labels and spanning headers

• Calculates default columns widths automatically

• Includes automatic wrapping and splitting of wide and long tables

• Integrates with the fmtr package to format numeric, date, and character data

• Plots from the popular ggplot2 package can be added to RTF, PDF, HTML, and DOCX reports

• Allows appending multiple tables to a report, multiple tables to a page, and intermingling of text, tables, and plots

• Supports in-report date/time stamps and "Page X of Y" page numbering

Key Functions

• create_report to define a report

• create_table to define a table

• create_text to define text content

• create_plot to define a plot

• write_report to write out the report

Package Assumptions and Limitations

Note that the reporter package is built on several assumptions, and has some limitations. Those assumptions and limitations are as follows:

• The current version supports both a monospace, fixed-width style report and a variable-width style report. The monospace report is the default. To create a variable width report, set the font parameter on the create_report function to 'Arial', 'Courier', or 'Times'.

• If a font is selected, it will be applied uniformly to the entire report. The package has no capabilities to mix different fonts in the same report.

• The package assumes that, except for formatting and layout, the incoming data is ready for printing. The reporter package has no capabilities to perform calculations, summaries, grouping, or derivations. Use the many capabilities in R to perform these operations prior to sending data to the reporter package.

• It is assumed that the incoming data is sorted as desired. The reporter package has no capabilities for sorting. Use the sorting functionality in Base R or supplemental packages to sort the data prior to sending to reporter.

• For monospace reports, titles, footnotes, page headers, and page footers must fit in the available space. If they don't, the reporter package will generate a warning. In these situations, the recommended course of action is to split the offending string into two or more strings that fit within the available width.

• The reporter package will never break a word. That means you cannot set a column width that is less than the length of the longest word. If you wish to break words, add the breaks with strwrap or an equivalent function before reporting.

• The package will make a best guess on column widths based on the width of the data and column headers. To override the best guess, set the column width directly by placing a width attribute on the variable or by using the column_defaults or define functions.

• The max automatic column width is 5 inches. Longer data values will be wrapped.

• The package support plots from ggplot2. These plots can be added to RTF, PDF, HTML, and DOCX output types. The package does not support Base R plots.

• The package currently supports styling for HTML reports. This styling allows setting background colors, font colors, border colors, and some font sizing and bolding.

Author(s)

Maintainer: David Bosak [e-mail]

Other contributors:

• Kevin Kramer [e-mail] [contributor]

• Duong Tran [e-mail] [contributor]

• Raphael Huang [e-mail] [contributor]

• Archytas Clinical Solutions [copyright holder]

See Also

Useful links:

• https://reporter.r-sassy.org

• https://github.com/dbosak01/reporter

• Report bugs at https://github.com/dbosak01/reporter/issues