CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rlatex
Jon Snow
Jon Snow

Reputation: 329

Output accented characters for use with latex

I'm trying to use R to create the content of a tex file. The content contains many accented letters and I not able to correctly write them to a tex file.

Here is a short minimal example of what I would like to perform:

I have a file texinput.tex, which already exists and is encoded as UTF8 without BOM. When I manually write é in Notepad++ and save this file, it compiles correctly in LaTex and the output is as expected.

Then I tried to do this in R:

str.to.write <- "é"
cat(str.to.write, file = "tex_list.tex", append=TRUE)

As a result, the encoded character xe9 appears in the tex file. LaTex throws this error when trying to compile: 

! File ended while scanning use of \UTFviii@three@octets.<inserted text>\par \include{texinput}

I then tried all of the following things before the cat command:

Encoding(str.to.write) <- "latin1"

-> same output error as above

str.to.write <- enc2utf8(str.to.write)

-> same output and error as above 

Encoding(str.to.write) <- "UTF-8"

-> this appears in the tex file: \xe9. LaTex throws this error: ! Undefined control sequence. \xe

Encoding(str.to.write) <- "bytes"

-> this appears in the tex file: \\xe9. LaTex compiles without error and the output is xe9

I know that I could replace é by \'{e}, but I would like to have an automatic method, because the real content is very long and contains words from 3 different Latin languages, so it has lots of different accented characters.

However, I would also be happy about a function to automatically sanitize the R output to be used with Latex. I tried using xtable and sanitize.text.function, but it appears that it doesn't accept character vectors as input.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 786

Answers (2)

XtrimA
XtrimA

Reputation: 143

Use TIPA for processing International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols in Latex. It has become standard in the linguistics field.

Upvotes: 0

Jon Snow
Jon Snow

Reputation: 329

After quite a bit of searching and trial-and-error, I found something that worked for me:

# create output function
writeTex <- function(x) {write.table(x, "tex_list.tex", 
                                     append = TRUE, row.names = FALSE, 
                                     col.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE,
                                     fileEncoding = "UTF-8")}
writeTex("é")

Output is as expected (é), and it compiles perfectly well in LaTex.

Upvotes: 1

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