tidytlg
A tables-listings-graphs package that reached CRAN and then went quiet.
Comparison · Analytics
markdown vs rlistings
A side-by-side editorial comparison of markdown and rlistings — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:r-package
markdown vs rlistings: at a glance
What is markdown?
A package that finished, declared itself done, and handed its core function to a successor.
The R markdown package spent 2023 adding real capability — fenced code block attributes, HTML widget rendering, compatibility shims for rmarkdown's document functions. Then 1.13 declared the package feature-complete and maintenance-only, naming litedown as where development continues. Version 2.0 completes that handover: mark(), the package's core function, is now a thin wrapper around litedown::mark(), and users are told to call litedown directly.
What is rlistings?
Clinical listings that keep inheriting their hardest problem — pagination — from the layer below.
rlistings renders clinical-trial subject listings and paginates them for regulatory output, sitting alongside rtables on the shared formatters engine. The releases in this window are dominated by pagination correctness: repeated key columns across pages, splitting by a variable, ordered-factor handling, column gaps, and font metrics. Development is a large rotating contributor set inside the insightsengineering organisation.
markdown vs rlistings: editorial side-by-side
markdown
0.0ANALYTICS
A package that finished, declared itself done, and handed its core function to a successor.
◆ Current state
The R markdown package spent 2023 adding real capability — fenced code block attributes, HTML widget rendering, compatibility shims for rmarkdown's document functions. Then 1.13 declared the package feature-complete and maintenance-only, naming litedown as where development continues. Version 2.0 completes that handover: mark(), the package's core function, is now a thin wrapper around litedown::mark(), and users are told to call litedown directly.
◆ Where it's heading
This is a controlled retirement rather than abandonment. The maintainer closed out the outstanding feature work first, announced the succession explicitly, and only then reduced the package to a compatibility surface. What remains is a stable shim for the installed base while new work happens in a package with a different name and scope.
◆ Prediction
Expect only CRAN-driven fixes here from now on, with any genuinely new rendering capability appearing in litedown instead. The entries state this policy directly, so the main open question is how long the wrapper is kept before deprecation warnings appear.
rlistings
0.0ANALYTICS
Clinical listings that keep inheriting their hardest problem — pagination — from the layer below.
◆ Current state
rlistings renders clinical-trial subject listings and paginates them for regulatory output, sitting alongside rtables on the shared formatters engine. The releases in this window are dominated by pagination correctness: repeated key columns across pages, splitting by a variable, ordered-factor handling, column gaps, and font metrics. Development is a large rotating contributor set inside the insightsengineering organisation.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is progressively delegating pagination to formatters rather than implementing it — paginate_listing() was refactored to call formatters' paginate_to_mpfs() directly, and truetype font support arrived through a new formatters API. That reduces duplicated logic but ties the package's page-break behaviour to a dependency it shares with rtables. Feature work beyond pagination is thin: better error messages for unsupported column classes, a cheatsheet.
◆ Prediction
Expect pagination fidelity to remain the focus, with changes arriving as formatters exposes more of its layout machinery rather than as rlistings-native features.
Alternatives to markdown and rlistings
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either markdown or rlistings.
Tplyr
Tplyr made clinical summary tables explain where every number came from.
hoardr
A cache-directory helper that has shipped nothing but CRAN-triggered patches for seven years.
gigs
gigs redesigned its whole conversion API for rOpenSci, then spent three releases getting the docs to build.
riem
A weather-data client that keeps rewriting its HTTP layer while slowly tightening its API.
datasetjson
datasetjson rebuilt its object model to track the CDISC Dataset-JSON 1.1 schema.
See all markdown alternatives → · See all rlistings alternatives →
Recent activity from markdown and rlistings
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1y agomarkdownmark() becomes a thin wrapper around litedown::mark()
- 1y agorlistingsError and message handling for difftime and zero-row listings
- 1y agorlistingsTrueType font support and col_gap in pagination
- 2y agomarkdownPackage declared feature-complete; work moves to litedown ⚡
- 2y agorlistingssplit_into_pages_by_var() and pagination moved onto formatters
- 2y agomarkdownAdds compatibility shims for rmarkdown's document functions
- 2y agomarkdownFixes verbatim code blocks with language attributes
- 2y agomarkdownFixes raw blocks broken by code-block attribute support
- 2y agomarkdownFenced code blocks gain attributes; HTML widgets render
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between markdown and rlistings?
Both compete on the same themes — r-package — within Analytics. markdown and rlistings are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is markdown better than rlistings?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. markdown and rlistings are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to markdown?
Top markdown alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "markdown alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/markdown for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to rlistings?
Top rlistings alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "rlistings alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/rlistings for the full list with editorial commentary on each.