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 ontable format.
- Data manipulation and analysis should be handled by other R packages, for example, tidyverse.
- Minimize package dependency.
TheR 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.
- Customized column header: split by
- 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 attributesrtf_encode()%>%# Step 2 Convert attributes to RTF encodewrite_rtf(file="ex-tbl.rtf")# Step 3 Write to a .rtf fileClick 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}}

