Latex and Python or R integration

Question

Hi, I have a project that involves reporting automation. Currently all reports are done through word and graphics in excel, now I’m trying to implententar an application that generates graphics automatically in linguagem R and wanted these graphics to be formatted in a beautiful banner on LaTex (I’ve always heard good things about this complicated text).

In this application I’m using: R logically to the graphics, python for data manipulation and integration with banks mysql.

The graphics are made in R, but you can do it in python also, because I use the library ggplot2, which is accepted in both.

And I wanted to integrate all of that in the end LaTex generating the file.

In this case I would like directions, guidelines and tips if possible.

Answer 1

First of all, I’m not familiar with the Python language, so I’m going to focus on the R language. For data handling with R and sql, you can take a look at the package RSQLite which is particularly well done.

Whereas you do the manipulation of data and graphics on R and the report via LaTeX, here are some options to perform the analyses, graphs and report automatically and reproducible:

1. R and Latex integrated by a makefile

make is a way to automate processes that you would do by hand on your system. In your example, you would codify a Makefile script to first run the R/python scribe for analysis, then run the R script to create the charts and save to a folder and then run the Latex script to create the report using the outputs of previous scripts.

Positive: complete flexibility for each step taken and good organization of each project script.

Negative: Makefile is a little hard to create and is native to the linux and iOS systems. I don’t know how it works on Windows.

2. R and Latex integrated by Sweave

Sweave is an extension .Rnw of knitr which allows you to embed R code in Latex documents to generate a PDF file. In summary, you write the report in latex and for each analysis/graph, you enter the code R.

Positive: flexible and easy to use if you know Latex

Negative: I have the impression that there are few users compared to Rmarkdown, which makes it a little harder to solve problems online.

3. R and Latex integrated by Rmarkdown

Rmarkdown is an R package that allows you to embed R code into markdown documents. It has virtually the same approach as Sweave, only more flexible because it allows exporting to several extensions (pdf, html, word...).

Positive: More friendly and simple to learn if you don’t know Latex. In addition to the cleaner syntax.

Negative: The report formatting is not as flexible as Latex. But the interesting thing is that you can incorporate Latex or html styles into the document.

In conclusion, I personally believe that Rmarkdown will be the easiest and fastest way to accomplish your goals.

Answer 2

In this case, the best solution is to use the rmarkdown. To get an idea of how it works, open Rstudio and go to the menu File > New File > R Markdown...

Choose Document and PDF options (note that Latex needs to be installed to work):

This will generate you a .Rmd. The default file has the contents below:

---
title: "Untitled"
author: "Marcus Nunes"
date: "3/12/2018"
output: pdf_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

## R Markdown

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see <http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com>.

When you click the **Knit** button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

```{r cars}
summary(cars)
```

## Including Plots

You can also embed plots, for example:

```{r pressure, echo=FALSE}
plot(pressure)
```

Note that the `echo = FALSE` parameter was added to the code chunk to prevent printing of the R code that generated the plot.

If you are using Windows, just use the Ctrl+Shift+K shortcut to compile the document.

If you cannot use Rstudio, there are other ways to compile the report, but they are more complicated than simply running Ctrl+Shift+K. I wrote a few years ago some scripts in bash to do this, but I migrated to Rstudio for the ease that the program generates.

There are several references about R Markdown on the internet. This is a good course on the subject (Disclaimer: I wrote it).