Plotting tables alsongside charts in R

Occasionally I’d like to plot a table alongside a chart in R, e.g. to present summary statistics of the graph itself. Thanks to the gridExtra package this is quite straightforward. The function tableGrob creates a table like plot of a data frame, while arrangeGrob allows me to arrange ggplot2, lattice and grid graphical objects (short ‘grobs‘, such as tableGrob) on a page.

Here is a little example:

Session Info

R version 3.1.3 (2015-03-09)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.3 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils    
[6] datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] gridExtra_0.9.1 ggplot2_1.0.1  

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] colorspace_1.2-6 digest_0.6.8     gtable_0.1.2    
 [4] labeling_0.3     MASS_7.3-40      munsell_0.4.2   
 [7] plyr_1.8.1       proto_0.3-10     Rcpp_0.11.5     
[10] reshape2_1.4.1   scales_0.2.4     stringr_0.6.2   
[13] tools_3.1.3