r2rtf
The clinical-report table engine learned Chinese, then learned to leave RTF entirely
Comparison · Analytics
textshaping vs ymlthis
A side-by-side editorial comparison of textshaping and ymlthis — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
textshaping vs ymlthis: at a glance
What is textshaping?
Rewrote its shaping engine for bidirectional text, then spent a year fixing what that broke.
textshaping is the text layout layer beneath R's modern graphics stack, feeding ragg, ggplot2 and marquee. Version 1.0.0 rewrote the shaping engine to honour the global direction of text, adding a direction argument that defaults to automatic detection, align settings that resolve against that direction, and ICU-based soft break locations that handle ideographic scripts properly. The five releases since have been consecutive bug fixes against that rewrite — bidi embedding arrangement, line positioning with mixed sizes, a weak hash in the shape cache, a signed integer overflow, and font fallback regressions.
What is ymlthis?
ymlthis retired itself, naming Quarto as the reason it no longer needs to exist.
ymlthis built R Markdown YAML front matter programmatically — a fluent `yml_*()` interface plus RStudio add-ins, so users did not have to hand-write metadata blocks whose valid fields were scattered across output-format documentation. Version 1.0.0 declares the package retired, with only CRAN-preserving changes to follow, and states the reason plainly: Quarto now provides good YAML support.
textshaping vs ymlthis: editorial side-by-side
textshaping
0.0ANALYTICS
Rewrote its shaping engine for bidirectional text, then spent a year fixing what that broke.
◆ Current state
textshaping is the text layout layer beneath R's modern graphics stack, feeding ragg, ggplot2 and marquee. Version 1.0.0 rewrote the shaping engine to honour the global direction of text, adding a direction argument that defaults to automatic detection, align settings that resolve against that direction, and ICU-based soft break locations that handle ideographic scripts properly. The five releases since have been consecutive bug fixes against that rewrite — bidi embedding arrangement, line positioning with mixed sizes, a weak hash in the shape cache, a signed integer overflow, and font fallback regressions.
◆ Where it's heading
The package has moved from Latin-first layout to script-agnostic layout in two rewrites, 0.4.0 and 1.0.0, and is now in the long correctness tail that follows. The bug reports arriving from ggplot2, ragg and marquee issue numbers show how it works in practice: textshaping bugs surface as rendering defects in the packages above it, which is why so many fixes here cite another package's issue tracker.
◆ Prediction
Expect continued fixes driven by downstream rendering reports rather than new layout features, as the 1.0.x series stabilises. The font fallback path has produced two of the recent bugs and is the most likely source of the next.
ymlthis
0.0ANALYTICS
ymlthis retired itself, naming Quarto as the reason it no longer needs to exist.
◆ Current state
ymlthis built R Markdown YAML front matter programmatically — a fluent `yml_*()` interface plus RStudio add-ins, so users did not have to hand-write metadata blocks whose valid fields were scattered across output-format documentation. Version 1.0.0 declares the package retired, with only CRAN-preserving changes to follow, and states the reason plainly: Quarto now provides good YAML support.
◆ Where it's heading
The retirement is the endpoint of a long drift. Between 2020 and 2022 every release was reactive — patching around a crayon update that mangled rendered YAML, tracking shiny 1.6, following roxygen2 7.0.0, fixing a typo in an add-in. No new capability has landed in six years, and the four-year gap before 1.0.0 had already answered the question the release note finally makes explicit.
◆ Prediction
Nothing further of substance is expected — the stated policy is changes only where CRAN requires them, so the next release, if any, will be a compatibility patch.
Alternatives to textshaping and ymlthis
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 textshaping or ymlthis.
DoseFinding
New stewardship at openpharma, then two releases adding the methods MCP-Mod was missing
webmockr
The stubbing library added httr2 support, then spent a year cutting itself free of everything else
crul
crul took mocking back from webmockr and made it a property of the client itself
dendroNetwork
Six releases, six identical bodies — the feed carries the package abstract instead of release notes
chattr
chattr deleted every LLM integration it had written and outsourced the lot to ellmer
See all textshaping alternatives → · See all ymlthis alternatives →
Recent activity from textshaping and ymlthis
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 5mo agotextshapingFixes reverting between font fallbacks
- 5mo agoymlthisymlthis retired; Quarto covers the need ⚡
- 9mo agotextshapingGuards against freetype version mismatches with systemfonts
- 11mo agotextshapingFixes a signed integer overflow in the previous fix
- 11mo agotextshapingFixes bidi single-line shaping and a weak shape-cache hash
- 1y agotextshapingFixes hard line breaks across multiple embeddings
- 1y agotextshapingShaping engine rewritten to honour global text direction ⚡
- 4y agoymlthisTypo fixed in the miniUI add-in check
- 4y agoymlthisyml_author() accepts yml_blank(); shiny fixes
- 4y agoymlthisciteproc handling moved to newer rmarkdown functions
- 5y agoymlthisPatched a crayon update that mangled rendered YAML
- 5y agoymlthisAdjustments for shiny 1.6
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between textshaping and ymlthis?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. textshaping and ymlthis 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 textshaping better than ymlthis?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. textshaping and ymlthis 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 textshaping?
Top textshaping alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "textshaping alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/textshaping for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to ymlthis?
Top ymlthis alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ymlthis alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ymlthis for the full list with editorial commentary on each.