Printing significant figures regardless of decimal point
<p>The table below (mean ± se) contains true data that will be presented in a publication. As you can see, the data has a very wide range. Using R, I rounded all numbers to 3 significant figures, but I want to include trailing zeros as well as zeros to the left of the decimal point as significant to try to keep the table tidy. So basically I want ALL numbers, on either side of the decimal point, zeros included, to be considered significant, so that only 3 digits are printed regardless of the number. Is this possible? I have tried <code>signif</code>, <code>round</code>,<code>sprintf</code>,<code>options()</code> and <code>formatC</code>, without success.
These results were obtained using <code>x$summary = paste(signif(x$Value, digits=3), "\u00b1", signif(x$se, digits=3))</code></p>

<pre><code>35.2 ± 3.13 &gt; this is good
124 ± 14.8 &gt; this is good
196 ± 6.53 &gt; this is good
1.34 ± 0.0505 &gt; I would like this to become 1.34 ± 0.05
0.0443 ± 0.00386 &gt; I would like this to become 0.04 ± 0.00
123 ± 0.0067 &gt; I would like this to become 123 ± 0.01
</code></pre>