R/latexpdf.R

In latexpdf: Convert Tables to PDF or PNG

#' Create LaTeX Code and PDF Documents.
#'
#' \pkg{latexpdf} helps you create pdf documents in R using
#' LaTeX techniques; this is especially useful for making stand-alone
#' PDF images of data.frames.  For report-length PDF, some flavor
#' of markup or markdown (e.g. Sweave, Rmarkdown) is probably a more
#' attractive mechanism for the main document; in this context, \pkg{latexpdf}
#' can be used to embed tables with the same aesthetics as stand-alone
#' versions.
#'
#' "Anything in LaTeX can be expressed in terms of commands and environments",
#' (<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Absolute_Beginners>). Accordingly,
#' \pkg{latexpdf} provides R functions to generate LaTeX commands (command()) and
#' environments (wrap()).  For commands, care is taken to support options
#' and arguments. These can be used to create character vectors containing
#' arbitrary LaTeX code.
#'
#' In fact, the package itself uses these functions to convert data frames
#' to LaTeX code, providing reasonable defaults and supporting many
#' aesthetic interventions.  See '?as.tabular' and '?as.ltable' (tabular and
#' table environments, respectively).  See also 'vignette('tabular')
#' for a demonstration of options.
#'
#' While \pkg{latexpdf} can be useful for low-level operations, creating PDF
#' documents directly is more powerful. Pre-generated LaTeX code can be inserted
#' into literate programming documents (Sweave, Rmarkdown) or can be auto-converted
#' to stand-alone PDF documents (see especially '?as.pdf.data.frame'). Functions
#' tex2pdf() and viewtex() create and visualize arbitrary tex code by converting to
#' PDF documents. They rely on as.pdf.document(), which places a system call
#' to 'pdflatex'.
#'
#' Some file formats, such as MS Word and Powerpoint, cannot embed PDF images.
#' Experimental support is available for converting PDF to PNG.  For example,
#' if you switch from Rmarkdown's pdf_document() to word_document(), you
#' may want to switch from as.pdf() to as.png() for your images.  PNG
#' functionality relies requires the local Ghostscript installation (see
#' '?ghostconvert') which is almost certainly present if 'pdflatex' is.
#' Ghostscript may be hard to find. See '?tools::find_gs_cmd'; for Miktex
#' installations, consider 'find_gs_cmd(gs_cmd = 'mgs')'.
#'
#' @docType package
#' @name latexpdf-package
#' @author Tim Bergsma, \email{bergsmat@gmail.com}

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