semTable package for R needs a maintainer

[Paul Johnson]

Dear friends:

I prepared the semTable package for R during the time I was working in the University. Last year, I decided to take a position in private business.  I intended to continue working on R packages, but as time passed, I realized I cannot keep up. I developed  semTable in order to accelerate the work of GRAs that I was supervising.  Now, that motivation has evaporated.  Alas, there are no GRAs doing SEM in my section of corporate America. 

I'm attaching a PDF that shows examples of what the package can do now.

If you are interested in taking this over, please let me know.  Please write to my personal email server, paulj...@freefaculty.org.  My gmail account is overrun by spam and noise!

So you can see what you are getting into,  I've moved the Git repo from a private server to GitHub. Please feel free to inspect.

https://github.com/pauljohn32/semTable

This was the most complicated bit of R programming I have done.  The interface allows a huge amount of flexibility in setting up SEM tables. The last piece that I concentrated on was the integration of the siunitx package for decimal centering in LaTeX output. Ironically, this feature has been the source of the most frequent maintenance requests. It appears that every other update in siunitx breaks something, although at the moment everything is fine.

Aside from fixing miscellaneous bugs and sending revisions into CRAN, there are a few development projects you might consider.  Output for multilevel SEM might be next.

I stopped working on this package when lavaan was introducing multi-level models.  I did not have a standard output style guide for that and did not try very hard to build one.  A few people emailed asking for that feature, but nobody could show me what they wanted.

The package will stay on CRAN until it fails their periodic update tests.  You, yes YOU, can step into the breach and save this fine piece of Midwestern ingenuity!

pj