45  Summary

If you take one thing from this book, take the shape of the workflow: construct, plot, decorate, save. An hv_*() constructor does the analysis and hands you a bare ggplot. You add scales, labels, and a theme. You save it for wherever it is going. The figure’s content is decided once and its appearance as many times as you have audiences, and because every recipe makes its own data, you can always go back to a working example and adapt it.

45.1 The next analysis

The chapters are organized around the questions rather than the functions, so the same six steps carry from one analysis to the next.

Frame the question. Decide what the figure or table has to answer before choosing anything that draws it. Describing a cohort, comparing time to an event, and explaining a model are different jobs, and the parts of this book are split along exactly that line.

Choose the recipe. Each part opens with a table matching a question to a chapter. When you know the function name but not the chapter, the function map goes the other way.

Inspect the object. Every constructor returns data before it returns a picture. Print it, look at the columns, check the counts against what you expect from the cohort. A figure drawn from a frame you never read is a figure you cannot defend in review.

Read the result. Say what the figure shows in the units it is drawn in, and be careful about which claim the estimate supports. Description, prediction, association and causation are not interchangeable, and most of the pitfalls collected in these chapters are one of those four being read as another.

Deliver it. Match the theme to the destination and fix the geometry to the space you were given: theme_hv_manuscript() and save_manuscript() for a journal, theme_hv_poster() and hv_ggsave_dims() for a poster panel, hv_ppt_series() and save_ppt() for a deck. A CORR figure names its groups on the panel rather than in a margin key.

Record what produced it. The build stamps the family versions it ran against into sibling-versions.json, and Section 2.2 shows how. Do the same in your own project. A figure whose provenance is a memory is a figure you cannot rebuild when a reviewer asks for one change eighteen months later.

45.2 Tables, and what is not here yet

Tables split along the same line as everything else: gt for anything headed into this book or another HTML document, and hvtiRtables for the manuscript Word tables, turning a gtsummary summary into CORR’s flat-header format (or JTCVS’s merged one).

Manuscript scaffolding beyond the figure and the table, the project skeleton a paper is written into, lives in hvtiRtemplates. That is companion material for a future book rather than this one, and it is named here only so you know it is not a gap you missed.

Treat the book as living. When you build a figure for a paper that is not here, or find a cleaner way to draw one that is, add it. The point of collecting these recipes was never to finish the list, it was to make the next figure easier than the last.