Add support for figures

[mstackhouse]

Expand clinify to support addition of figures into the output.

[mattkumar]

Just what I was wondering... :)

We're using clinify in making a small results package for a study / pilot, some of the results will be generated by ggplot as well.

I've tried to first generate the document, read it back in with officer, append an image with officer and write it back.

doc2 <- read_docx("clinify_output.docx")
doc2 <- body_add_gg(doc2, value = my_awesome_plot, width = 10, height = 7, res = 300)
print(doc2, target = "final_output.docx")

I get an error that occurs while printing the final docx:

Error in data.frame(content_section = content_section_chrs, file_name = file_names, : arguments imply differing number of rows: 0, 1

I need to take a closer look at my workflow (its super hacky atm), but if it's helpful I'm using as_clintable(), write_clintable() and clin_add_titles() so far in my script.

Also: Hope you've been keeping well man, it's been a while!

[mstackhouse]

Interestingly, this only happens if titles and footnotes are set:

library(clinify)
library(ggplot2)

ct1 <- clintable(head(iris)) 
ct2 <- clintable(head(iris)) |>
  clin_add_titles("title")

# Basic scatter plot
plt <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) +
  geom_point() +
  labs(title = "Car Weight vs MPG",
      x = "Weight (1000 lbs)",
      y = "Miles per Gallon")

# Works
write_clindoc(ct1, "~/Downloads/works.docx")
docx <- officer::read_docx("~/Downloads/works.docx")
docx2 <- officer::body_add_gg(docx, value = plt, width = 10, height = 7, res = 300)
print(docx2, target = "~/Downloads/works_with_plot.docx")

# Doesn't work
write_clindoc(ct2, "~/Downloads/breaks.docx")
docx <- officer::read_docx("~/Downloads/breaks.docx")
docx2 <- officer::body_add_gg(docx, value = plt, width = 10, height = 7, res = 300)
print(docx2, target = "~/Downloads/breaks_with_plot.docx")
#> Error in data.frame(content_section = content_section_chrs, file_name = file_names, : arguments imply differing number of rows: 0, 1

^{Created on 2025-07-21 with reprex v2.1.1}

That said, I don't think this approach would even solve the underlying issue (easily), because the tabels still writes to the body, and right now you can't write a document out without one.

I think a proper implementation of this should be reasonably straightforward though. Tables have a lot of pagination concerns. Plots should realistically be one plot object per page. So the flow could be:

• Create a list of plots
• Add list of plots to clindoc()
• Page break between each element passed to clindoc().

Hope you're doing well too, @mattkumar! Thanks for always being an early package tester here!

[mstackhouse]

@mattkumar check out #92 because apparently this is possible and I just didn't realize how.