Document editing and report creation are key parts of any researcher’s workflow. Thankfully, the tools to edit research documents have improved greatly over the last few years. While I used to write most documents with $ \LaTeX $, I’d now recommend that researchers use R Markdown.
R Markdown allows the use of R code in a Markdown format and is also easily extended with features. For example, there is the excellent bookdown package which allows easy use of book formatting, bibliographies and cross-references with Markdown.
LaTeX is a fantastic way to create and display print-ready scientific documents. There are a number of different ways to edit and produce LaTeX documents, which we’ll revist in a future post. In this post, I want to deal with one of the major issues that people find difficult with LaTeX: tables.
LaTeX can certainly produce any type of table you’d like to create, but it does so in a way that can be very difficult to follow visually.