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.