Feature consideration: Add figure support

[billdenney]

Summary

I would like to be able to use the formatters package not just for tables and listings but also for graphs. (I realize this is out of the current scope, but I think it could be realized with a surprisingly small change and then formatters would be able to handle all TFL generation.)

What are you trying to do, that you are unable to achieve
with this package as it currently stands?

I am trying to have consistent formatting for graphs for clinical study report appendices to what I have with tables and figures.

• Provide examples of real-world use cases that this would enable
  and how it solves the problem you described.

Adding consistent headings and footers to graphs is not directly supported with current methods. Using the machinery of formatters could add those headers and footers, especially when combined with the ggtibble package for many combined graphs.

• How do you solve this now?

I manually use code like:

pdf()
print(my_figure)
grid.text(add_annotations)
dev.off()

• Have you tried to work around the problem using other tools?

Yes, and I have not found other tools that handle figures consistently with tables and listings.

• Could there be a different approach to solving this issue?

See above with my current method. Also Rmarkdown/Quarto could be used, but those take longer to generate and are hard to achieve consistent formatting via LaTeX.

As a clinical study statistician, I want to generate my TFL consistently, so that I both have a consistent look and have an easy way to add headers and footers.

[Melkiades]

I am not super sure I understand what your issue needs. Is it a matter of font, sizing, formats in plots?

[billdenney]

It's generally aligning the plot outputs in a .pdf file to look similar to the table outputs.

For example, putting multiline title and subtitles in, footnotes, provenance footers, and page numbering at the bottom right. It would help to have a consistent interface for generating figures as tables is the main goal.

[Melkiades]

I see! This is not really the purpose of formatters. We usually rely on export functions to do so and we are currently working on a package that would solve that in a similar way to what you are proposing called {pager}. In general anyway it depends a lot on the export method, see {rtables.officer} for the docx standard output. Plots are usually exported as svg and then decorated with the prov footers page numbering etc

[Melkiades]

Anyway this is a decoration unification that would happen only at last. We do not have plans to change the plots fonts or sizing to fit tables defaults so far. It is going to be difficult to align and keep them aligned when also sizing and page fits are not precise or certain. Overall, I would close this issue as it is on one side a matter of the export step and on the other side changing the internal fonts and sizes is something that cannot be done by formatters but by specific plotting functions if ever needed (all in {tern})

[billdenney]

Thanks for those pointer. It makes sense that it is out of scope here.