When we are talking about table generators in R,
knitr's kable() function wins lots of flavor
by its ultimate simplicity. Unlike those powerful table rendering engines
such as xtable, the philosophy
behind knitr::kable() is to
make it easy for programmers to use. Just as it claimed in its
function description, "this is a very simple table generator. It is simple
by design. It is not intended to replace any other R packages for making
tables. - Yihui".
However, the ultimate simplicity of kable() also brought troubles to some
of us, especially for new R users, who may not have a lot of experience on
generating tables in R. It is not rare to see people including experienced
users asking questions like how to center/left-align a table on Stack
Overflow. Also, for me personally, I found myself repeatedly parsing CSS
into kable() for some very simple features like striped lines. For LaTeX,
it's even worse since I'm almost Stack Overflow dependent for LaTeX...
That's why this package kableExtra was created.
I hope with kableExtra, you can
Use default base kable() (Or a good alternative for markdown tables is
pander::pander()) for all simple tables
Use kable() with kableExtra to generate 90 % of complex/advanced
tables in either HTML or LaTeX
Only have to mess with raw HTML/LaTeX in the last 10% cases where
kableExtra cannot solve the problem
For a full package documentation, please visit the package documentation site for more information
Pipable syntax: kableExtra is NOT a table generating package. It is a
package that can "add features" to a kable output using a syntax
that every useR loves - the pipe.
We see similar approaches to deal with plots in packages like ggvis and
plotly. There is no reason why we cannot use it with tables.
Unified functions for both HTML and PDF: Most functionalities in
kableExtra can work in both HTML and PDF. In fact, as long as you
specifies format in kable (which can be set globally through option
knitr.table.format), functions in this package will pick the right way
to manipulate the table be themselves. As a result, if users want to left
align the table, kable_styling(kable(...), position = "left") will work
in both HTML and PDF.