Yihui Xie • 7/10/2026

The lt Package: Lightweight HTML Tables for R (and Beyond)

This article introduces the lt R package, a lightweight alternative to gt for creating HTML tables. It describes the author's motivation after experiencing gt's heavy dependency tree, and explains how lt uses only base R and xfun on the R side, with a 10KB vanilla-JS file for rendering. The package relies on a JSON spec rather than R code to generate tables, making it fast and dependency-light. The article covers the grammar of tables, HTML-first philosophy, and practical use cases for tech projects.

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#JavaScript #json #R