metatools
SDTM supplemental-qualifier merging got sturdier, then the package went quiet for two years.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of marquee and teal.modules.clinical — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
marquee is filling in the typographic details — outlines, border types, real font metrics for underlines.
marquee renders markdown text onto R graphics devices, and backs element_marquee() and geom_marquee() in ggplot2. Development ran in a tight burst through August and September 2025: 1.1.0 added text outlines, a size shortcut and remote PNG/JPEG support, 1.2.0 added border and outline line types and moved underline placement onto font metrics, and 1.2.1 cleaned up the bugs those introduced.
Roche's clinical teal modules have settled into slow, decorator-driven maintenance.
The module library took its architectural break in 0.9.0, when every module moved to teal_data objects and dropped data_extract_spec inputs. Work since then is narrower: formatting arguments, decorator plumbing, and per-module bug fixes. The 0.13.0 candidates cut in July 2026 are a two-tag same-day release where the first tag carries all the notes.
marquee renders markdown text onto R graphics devices, and backs element_marquee() and geom_marquee() in ggplot2. Development ran in a tight burst through August and September 2025: 1.1.0 added text outlines, a size shortcut and remote PNG/JPEG support, 1.2.0 added border and outline line types and moved underline placement onto font metrics, and 1.2.1 cleaned up the bugs those introduced.
The package is converging on typographic fidelity rather than new capability. Early work settled layout semantics — CSS margin collapsing, inline padding reserving space during shaping, devices without glyph support — and recent releases refine how decorations are drawn and measured. The naming cleanup in 1.2.0, border_size becoming border_width, reads as an API being tidied ahead of wider use rather than one still being explored.
Expect continued small releases sanding down rendering edge cases in ggplot2 contexts, since that is where the recent bug reports come from; nothing here signals a new feature area.
The module library took its architectural break in 0.9.0, when every module moved to teal_data objects and dropped data_extract_spec inputs. Work since then is narrower: formatting arguments, decorator plumbing, and per-module bug fixes. The 0.13.0 candidates cut in July 2026 are a two-tag same-day release where the first tag carries all the notes.
Development has shifted from reshaping the module API to making outputs configurable — numeric formatting in tm_t_summary, several decorators applied to one output object, categorical statistics in summary_by. Changes arrive from a wide bench of Roche engineers with occasional outside contributors, and releases go through candidates rather than straight to final.
A 0.13.0 final should follow the candidates with little beyond a dependency bump; the decorator work ported from teal.modules.general is the most likely source of the next batch of changes.
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 marquee or teal.modules.clinical.
SDTM supplemental-qualifier merging got sturdier, then the package went quiet for two years.
A clinical-script logger that stopped shipping after its 0.2 line, changelogs made of merged PRs.
R's object inspector is losing its view of the internals as CRAN closes off the private C API.
A weather-station data client that broke one return type to hand back distances instead of bare IDs.
giscoR's 1.0 moved its dataset index into the cache, so new Eurostat releases arrive without a package update.
FedData has spent two major versions migrating US federal geodata off R's retiring spatial stack.
See all marquee alternatives → · See all teal.modules.clinical alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. marquee and teal.modules.clinical 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.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. marquee and teal.modules.clinical 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.
Top marquee alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "marquee alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/marquee for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top teal.modules.clinical alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "teal.modules.clinical alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/teal-modules-clinical for the full list with editorial commentary on each.