ggpointless
ggpointless keeps adding the ggplot2 layers nobody else bothered to write.
A side-by-side editorial comparison of standardlastprofile and tabular — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
A German electricity load-profile package added gas and doubled the market it serves.
standardlastprofile implements the BDEW standard load profiles that German utilities use to assign consumption to customers without interval metering. Until June it did electricity only. Version 2.0.0 added the gas side — the SigLinDe synthetic procedure across all 15 BDEW gas profile IDs — and gave electricity a new primary interface, slp_electricity(), with slp_generate() superseded but retained.
tabular went from clinical tables to complete TFL output in under two months.
tabular renders pre-summarised clinical tables, figures and listings to RTF, LaTeX, HTML, PDF, DOCX, Markdown and now Typst from one immutable verb pipeline, with no external SAS or Java runtime. It arrived in June 2026 as a CRAN submission candidate, added figure() a month later to cover the F in TFL, and has spent the 0.3.x line on speed, font resolution and toolchain diagnostics.
standardlastprofile implements the BDEW standard load profiles that German utilities use to assign consumption to customers without interval metering. Until June it did electricity only. Version 2.0.0 added the gas side — the SigLinDe synthetic procedure across all 15 BDEW gas profile IDs — and gave electricity a new primary interface, slp_electricity(), with slp_generate() superseded but retained.
The package is converting from a dataset wrapper into a calculation library. Electricity profiles are tabulated values the package ships; gas profiles are computed from daily temperatures and a customer value through a coefficient-driven function, and the maintainer exposed the whole ladder — slp_gas() for the profile, slp_gas_kundenwert() to derive the customer value from a reference year, slp_gas_siglinde() for the raw h(theta) demand function so users can supply state-level coefficients, and coefficient and weekday-factor accessors underneath. The same instinct removed the built-in holiday table in favour of computing Easter directly, which lifted the date range cap from 2073 to open-ended. Deprecations are handled carefully throughout: renames keep working with lifecycle warnings, and the one hard break was already a warning since 1.1.0.
slp_gas_siglinde() was exported specifically so users could plug in region-specific coefficients such as Baden-Wurttemberg's, which points at state-level coefficient sets as the next thing to ship rather than leave to callers. The BDEW reference edition is now pinned to an Internet Archive permalink after the last one 404'd, so tracking edition changes is an ongoing maintenance cost.
tabular renders pre-summarised clinical tables, figures and listings to RTF, LaTeX, HTML, PDF, DOCX, Markdown and now Typst from one immutable verb pipeline, with no external SAS or Java runtime. It arrived in June 2026 as a CRAN submission candidate, added figure() a month later to cover the F in TFL, and has spent the 0.3.x line on speed, font resolution and toolchain diagnostics.
The work is converging on backend parity — one spec should render the same wherever you emit it. Recent notes are almost entirely gap-closing between targets: bold column headers and page-width correction on LaTeX, cell margins on DOCX, group-separator blank rows re-expressed as discardable space so a page never ends on a stray gap, whitespace collapsing honoured on Typst. Diagnostics are keeping pace, with check_latex() probing through kpsewhich and check_typst() auditing the compiler and font chain.
With both toolchain checkers in place, the friction that remains is environmental rather than featural, and the notes point to further parity and packaging fixes rather than another backend. Whether Typst becomes the default PDF path instead of LaTeX is not something these notes settle.
Other Infra & APIs 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 standardlastprofile or tabular.
ggpointless keeps adding the ggplot2 layers nobody else bothered to write.
mpactr spent two spring releases normalizing case in metadata after users kept tripping on it.
surveytidy taught every dplyr verb to operate on a whole collection of surveys at once.
surveycore declared its API stable with every survey design type covered.
PEIMAN2 cut its annotation database loose from its release cycle without breaking CRAN.
prospectr spent its biggest release in years fixing spectra it had been quietly mangling.
See all standardlastprofile alternatives → · See all tabular alternatives →
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
Both compete on the same themes — r-packages — within Infra & APIs. tabular is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. 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. tabular is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
Top standardlastprofile alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "standardlastprofile alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/standardlastprofile for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top tabular alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "tabular alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/tabular for the full list with editorial commentary on each.