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pythonvariableslatexpythonanywhere
tedioustortoise
tedioustortoise

Reputation: 269

Pdf-latex with python script, custom python variables into latex output

I currently have the following code which works to produce a PDF output. Is there a better way of writing up the content for the PDF, other than done here? This is a basic pdf, but am hoping to include multiple variables in later versions. I have inserted variable x, defined before the PDF content, into the latex pdf. Many thanks for any advice you can give.

PDF Output - image

import os
import subprocess

x = 7

content = \
r'''\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[margin=1cm,landscape]{geometry}
\title{Spreadsheet}
\author{}
\date{}
\begin{document}''' + \
r'This is document version: ' + str(x) +\
r'\end{document}'


parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-c', '--course')
parser.add_argument('-t', '--title')
parser.add_argument('-n', '--name',)
parser.add_argument('-s', '--school', default='My U')

args = parser.parse_args()

with open('doc.tex','w') as f:
    f.write(content%args.__dict__)

cmd = ['pdflatex', '-interaction', 'nonstopmode', 'doc.tex']
proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd)
proc.communicate()

retcode = proc.returncode
if not retcode == 0:
    os.unlink('doc.pdf')
    raise ValueError('Error {} executing command: {}'.format(retcode, ' '.join(cmd)))

os.unlink('doc.tex')
os.unlink('doc.log')```

Upvotes: 0

Views: 829

Answers (1)

Federico
Federico

Reputation: 781

As explained in this video, I think a better approach would be to export the variables from Python and save them into a .dat file using the following function.

def save_var_latex(key, value):
    import csv
    import os

    dict_var = {}

    file_path = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), "mydata.dat")

    try:
        with open(file_path, newline="") as file:
            reader = csv.reader(file)
            for row in reader:
                dict_var[row[0]] = row[1]
    except FileNotFoundError:
        pass

    dict_var[key] = value

    with open(file_path, "w") as f:
        for key in dict_var.keys():
            f.write(f"{key},{dict_var[key]}\n")

Then you can call the above function and save all the variables into mydata.dat. For example, in Python, you could save a variable and call it document_version using the following line of code: save_var_latex("document_version", 21)

In LaTeX (in the preamble of your main file), you just have to import the following packages:

% package to open file containing variables
\usepackage{datatool, filecontents}
\DTLsetseparator{,}% Set the separator between the columns.

% import data
\DTLloaddb[noheader, keys={thekey,thevalue}]{mydata}{../mydata.dat}
% Loads mydata.dat with column headers 'thekey' and 'thevalue'
\newcommand{\var}[1]{\DTLfetch{mydata}{thekey}{#1}{thevalue}}

Then in the body of your document just use the \var{} command to import the variable, as follows:

This is document version: \var{document_version}

Upvotes: 1

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