README.md

In r2rtf: Easily Create Production-Ready Rich Text Format (RTF) Tables and Figures

r2rtf

Overview

r2rtf is an R package to create production-ready tables and figures in RTF format. The package is designed with these principles:

• Provide simple “verb” functions that correspond to each component of a table, to help you translate data frame(s) to a table in RTF file.
• Functions are chainable with pipes (%>%).
• Only focus on table format.
• Data manipulation and analysis should be handled by other R packages, for example, tidyverse.
• Minimize package dependency.

The R for clinical study reports and submission book provides tutorials by using real world examples.

Installation

You can install the package via CRAN:

install.packages("r2rtf")

Or, install from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("Merck/r2rtf")

Highlighted features

The R package r2rtf provides flexibility to enable features below:

• Create highly customized RTF tables and figures ready for production.
• Simple to use parameters and data structure.
• Customized column header: split by "|".
• Three required parameters for the output tables (data, filename, column relative width).
• Flexible and detail control of table structure.
• Format control in cell, row, column and table level for:
• Border Type: single, double, dash, dot, etc.
• Alignment: left, right, center, decimal.
• Column width.
• Text appearance: bold, italics, ~~strikethrough~~, underline and any combinations.
• Font size.
• Text and border color (657 different colors named in color() function).
• Special characters: any character in UTF-8 encoding (e.g., Greek, Symbol, Chinese, Japanese, Korean).
• Append several tables into one file.
• Pagination.
• Built-in raw data for validation.

Simple example

library(dplyr)
library(r2rtf)

head(iris) %>%
  rtf_body() %>% # Step 1 Add attributes
  rtf_encode() %>% # Step 2 Convert attributes to RTF encode
  write_rtf(file = "ex-tbl.rtf") # Step 3 Write to a .rtf file

Click here to see the output

• More Examples

Example efficacy table

• Source code

Click here to see the output

Example safety table

• Source code

Click here to see the output

Citation

If you use this software, please cite it as below.

Wang, S., Ye, S., Anderson, K., & Zhang, Y. (2020). r2rtf—an R Package to Produce Rich Text Format (RTF) Tables and Figures. PharmaSUG. https://pharmasug.org/proceedings/2020/DV/PharmaSUG-2020-DV-198.pdf

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

@inproceedings{wang2020r2rtf,
  title     = {{r2rtf}---an {R} Package to Produce {Rich Text Format} ({RTF}) Tables and Figures},
  author    = {Wang, Siruo and Ye, Simiao and Anderson, Keaven M and Zhang, Yilong},
  booktitle = {PharmaSUG},
  year      = {2020},
  url       = {https://pharmasug.org/proceedings/2020/DV/PharmaSUG-2020-DV-198.pdf}
}

r2rtf documentation built on April 3, 2025, 9:22 p.m.