sweave tables as images?

you can open a device that has the exact dimensions of the table,

g = tableGrob(head(iris, 4))
png("test.png", width=convertWidth(grobWidth(g), "in", value=TRUE),
        height=convertHeight(grobHeight(g), "in",
value=TRUE),units="in", res=150)
grid.draw(g)
dev.off()

Doing this with knitr might be tricky though, since the unit
conversion opens a blank device window, and you'd want to define some
hook instead of manually creating the png file.

I have another version of grid.table where you can specify the width
and height manually [*], e.g to span the full window, but it's not
necessarily a desirable thing (the spacing between rows and columns
can become too large).


HTH,

baptiste


[*] experimental code at https://gist.github.com/2013903

On 26 May 2012 09:16, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin at ufl.edu> wrote:

Thanks Yihui,

That's a great idea, and comes close to the mark, except that I have to
use png's in order to "Insert & Link" them as pictures in Word (and
hence make the doc both shareable and update when new figures are
generated).

thanks,
allie

On 5/25/2012 2:57 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:

You may take a look at knitr's graphics manual which tells you how you
can automatically crop the white margins:
https://github.com/downloads/yihui/knitr/knitr-graphics.pdf ("Cropping
PDF Graphics").

I'm not sure if pdfcrop works in this case, though.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA


On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin at ufl.edu> wrote:

grid.table() works well, but using it in sweave creates graphics with
very wide margins.  I'm sure this has something to do with grid, and not
just grid.table.  Any idea how I can clip the graphic to the edges of
the table graphic?  I've looked into viewports, etc, but I can't seem to
find anything that will clip a graphic to its edges, perhaps with some
defined margin.

any help greatly appreciated!

thanks,
allie